Ideas are not the prerogative of the b-school graduates. Anyone who can think or has time to think or even a ‘need’ to think can be as creative in generating solutions to the business problems he faces. The only issue is that if he is not a b-school grad, then he may not know that what he has thought about is nothing but, say, a Porter framework or his marketing plan is nothing but , say, 4Ps in action. He knows what margins he needs and how much cash he needs to generate to breakeven; but he may not know that what he is actually doing is an NPV assessment of his business.

A conspicuous differentiator between a b-school grad and any other person (assuming he is not into too much of reading) is that a b-school grad thinks about his problems in frameworks and explains his thoughts in jargon. But often times the jargon, instead of being a mere point of communication, becomes a source of showoff leading to confounding and miscommunication.

Here are a few of my ‘favorite’ pieces (not necessarily exhaustive)

Information asymmetry
Sustainable competitive advantage
Network externalities
Capability ownership (really don’t know what it means)
(Of course) core competence
Competitive market dynamics
Cost inefficiencies
Game theoretic
(The triplets) LBO, MBO and Mezzanine financing
(The ubiquitous) DCF
Value chain analysis
Porter’s five forces
Moral hazard