You’ll learn more about management from mom than an MBA, says beverage billionaire

Here’s another reason why you should listen to your mother.

Sure, she told you to eat your vegetables, mind your manners and wear your galoshes, but Manoj Bhargava says your mom can also teach you a lot about managing a business.

💵💰Don’t miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet’s free daily newsletter 💰💵

The billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist discussed his views on his recently launched podcast The Business of Everything, which dives deep into the realities of business and investments. 

Now, you can spend thousands of dollars and years of your life taking business management courses — or you can take Bhargava’s advice.

Related: Billionaire delivers blunt words on Wall Street, investing

“The best place to learn management is from your mom,” he said. “She has a budget. She has unruly employees she can’t fire — 24/7. That’s really hard and that’s more management experience than any MBA professor.”

Manoj Bhargava says that too often in business people are asking the wrong questions.

Bridge Media Networks

5-hour Energy founder says ask the right questions

Bhargava, majority owner of TheStreet’s parent, The Arena Group  (AREN) , says that a really big problem in business today involves people asking the wrong questions.

“Let’s say you have a bunch of MBA students,” he said. “You say to them, ‘here’s a problem. I want to dig a hole that’s by 10 by 200 and 8 foot deep. Okay, how do I do it? What bulldozers do I use? What kind of it shovels? How many people? What’s the timetable all of that stuff?'”

And sure enough, he said, they’ll be working away on the little numbers they can find — and miss the key question.

“The real question somebody should ask is ‘why dig a hole?'” Bhargava said. “You ended up with the wrong question. You needed to be over here and you ended up over here.”

Related: 5-hour Energy billionaire reveals top business hack

This is done all the time in business, he said, where people ask the wrong question because a long time ago somebody taught them to do that.

“Normally, the answer is in the question,” he said. 

Bhargava, founder of the 5-hour Energy drink, assures listeners to his podcast that when he answers their questions, “it won’t be an MBA speak or a professor speak.”

“Most of the innovative stuff that’s been done has been done from people outside any industry,” he said. “They come in from the outside and they do it better. They’re called heretics sometimes. And then everybody says, ‘well, of course, they were right.'”

Bhargava maintains that the shameful part of all this is that much of what people need to know is really simple, but they’re getting the wrong guidance.

First investing effort is ‘minimize risk,’ Bhargava says

Determining where the risk is in business is everything, Bhargava said.

“I’ll ask people what is the purpose of investment,” he says, “and the first thing they’ll say is to make money. And I’ll say … no, no, no, the first purpose of investment is not to lose money. If you start with don’t lose money, you will do things very differently.”

The notion that you should be a risk taker is “completely idiotic,” Bhargava said.

“What you should be is a risk minimizer,” he said. “In every business, everything you invest in, whether it’s stocks, bonds or whatever, you’ve got to look at the risk. And the second question I always ask is, ‘is there something better?'”

The list of useless things that many companies do is longer than the useful list, Bhargava argued. “But they do them,” he said. “Why? Because they did them last year.”