Just today I came across an excerpt from a 1997 book entitled Heads You Win! by Quinn Spitzer and Ron Evans. It contrasts business leaders of the WWII generation with those of today. The old business leaders didn’t have nearly the formal management training of today’s. They did very well with skills learned not in the classroom, but “in the industrial jungle.” The point is that formal education isn’t the only or necessarily the best way for people to learn how to do things.

Here are a few paragraphs:

During the 1990s virtually an entire generation of top executives left their businesses, retired, or passed away. Many of these executives had achieved legendary status – [David] Packard at Hewlett-Packard, [Akio] Morita at Sony, [Sir John Harvey-]Jones at ICI, [Sam] Walton at Wal-Mart, and [Jan] Carlzon at SAS, to name a few. These leaders shared some notable characteristics that differentiate them from their successors. They lived through the Great Depression, which crippled the world’s economy in the 1930s; they experienced the horrors of World War II; they served their business apprenticeships in the postwar rebuilding
period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But what may differentiate them most from their counterparts of today is the issue of management. This ‘old guard’ was the last of a breed of executives who developed their management skills almost entirely in the workplace.
The executives of [the immediate post-war] period were not uneducated — in fact, many were extremely well educated – but they did not learn their approach to business from a business school, a management expert, a celebrated management book, or an outside consultant. Options such as these were not generally available. These executives learned their business skills in the industrial jungle. . . .
The forty-year-old executive of the 1990s, by contrast, probably holds one of the tens of thousands of MBAs awarded each year. His formal management education is supplemented by dozens of business periodicals and hundreds of management books. If, however, a situation seems resistant to even this mass of management wisdom, there are several hundred consulting firms and more than a hundred thousand consultants ready to provide additional management skill and knowledge.
That does not necessarily mean that the business executives of the past were superior to those of the present. . . . Still, we suspect that if those [managers] of years gone by found themselves at the helm of any of today’s extraordinarily complex and competitive business enterprises, they would steer a straight and successful course.