While I agree well-established knowledge is useful (don't get me started about NoSQL, for one thing), I'm not seeing any disdain for business know-how. What I'm seeing is the well-founded belief that you get business know-how from being in business, not from sitting in a classroom and coming out with a piece of paper.
I agree that experience from doing does trump book knowledge. But it would also be a mistake to discard the basic foundation that book knowledge grants you. Lots of rookie mistakes can be avoided by having some foundational knowledge.
Maybe. It depends on what you consider "foundational".
The Lean Manufacturing people, for example, have very different foundations than traditional American MBAs. Not opposite, really; more orthogonal. For example, MBAs focus on cost reduction and profit increase; in the Lean world you focus on reducing waste and increasing customer value. This leads to different accounting systems, different management structures, different outcomes.
Reading about the history of Toyota, where Lean ideas were developed, I suspect it's not accidental that they were both physically and culturally very distant from American business thinking. And that the background of Toyotas leaders was in engineering, not commerce.
Often when you ignore received wisdom, you are just forced to relearn it. But sometimes, you end up somewhere that nobody's been before.
