Here is an excerpt from an article by John A. Byrne for LinkedIn Pulse during which Steve Blank responds to Qs posed by Lauren Everitt. To read the complete Q&A and check out other articles, please click here.

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Steve Blank is a legend in Silicon Valley circles. Bearded and bespectacled, the serial entrepreneur speaks in anecdotes and questions–which he then answers, his voice rising with incredulity as though he’s continually uncovering new epiphanies.

In other words, he’s a damn good interview. So when Poets&Quants‘ Lauren Everitt recently sat down with him to ask some challenging questions about the role of business schools and MBAs in entrepreneurship, he didn’t pull any punches. As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’re sharing with LinkedIn readers a story a day from the more than 40 articles in our new digital iPad magazine devoted to MBA startups. Listen in to Lauren’s interview with the outspoken and always provocative Blank:

Is an MBA a worthwhile investment for an aspiring entrepreneur?

This is a conversation I have with all my students who want to go to business school. If the question is should I ever go to business school? Of course. But the next question is: Should I go to business school first? My advice is if you haven’t worked in a startup, don’t go to business school to work in one. I want you to get your hands dirty doing scut work. Try to be a founder or be a spear carrier. After a year, you’re going to decide whether this is the career for you, or whether you’d really be more happy as an investment banker.

Business schools are still treating startups as small versions of large companies. Most of these principles are not only wrong, they’re toxic. They’re destructive to early stage ventures. So the value of business school is no longer what I’m learning in my classes, but the value of networking and some of the other things that I might need to know when my startup gets big. The value diminishes, but that doesn’t mean it’s zero. It just means that it will be awhile before business schools catch up to this idea that there’s a separate stack of skills and knowledge for founders than for people who execute existing companies.

Why do you think business schools are missing the mark?

The problem is the content of what we’ve been teaching. And here’s why it ended up like that from my point of view. If you ask business school professors, do you consult? I’d say you’d get an extraordinarily high percentage who do. Great. Where do you consult? They consult with people who pay them. Great. Where are those people? They’re at large companies.

The better the faculty are, the larger the company they’re consulting. They treat a 100,000-person company the same as two people in a garage. That was the mistake–not understanding we needed an entirely different language, architecture, and management stack. It was unfair to expect professors who’ve never had to take out the trash and unstop the toilet at three in the morning as part of their consulting jobs to figure this out. It wasn’t an intelligence problem. It’s not that business school professors are dumb. It’s just they haven’t been exposed to the profession.

Which are the best business schools for entrepreneurship?

Berkeley got it in a second. Columbia got it in a second. Harvard gets it, but they have to rename everything. The good news is they teach students the concepts. The bad news is those students have no idea what language everybody else is speaking. Then there’s the third group: Screw-you-you’re-wrong that says, “No, we’re not changing our curriculum.” I respect that, too, because we can have an interesting conversation. The worst version, and I’ve seen this in another East Coast school, adds the new methodology on top of the old one. They’re checking all the possible boxes but not really understanding that they have to make an intellectual break. I think that does damage.

The faculty that get it are the ones who started companies. Why am I teaching at Stanford? The president of Stanford was an engineer and entrepreneur. Why am I teaching in the engineering school and not the business school? The guy who heads up the entrepreneurship program in the engineering school was an entrepreneur.

The joke is that the last people on earth to get it will be business school professors. But if you’ve ever been a practitioner, the minute you sit through a demo day, you go, “Boy, this is what we’ve been missing!”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

John A. Byrne is Chairman & Editor-in-Chief at C-Change Media Inc.