There's a reason why sole propreitorships have largely given way to megachains and megafranchise operations.

The Harvard MBAs often DO know more about running a small business than the small business owner.

Some of the advantage comes from economies of scale, of course, but even in terms of day to day operation of a business the analysis and research done by the experts probably beats the typical business owner. There are a lot of small businesses that come nowhere near optimising what they could be making from their shop had they a better understanding of marketing/advertising, accounting, long-range planning, etc.

Heck, both of my grandfathers were small business owners -- one a gas station in fact, the other a specialty sheet metal fab -- and they made plenty of _terrible_ business and financial decisions through lack of knowledge, even if they were great with carburetors or stainless steel. A high school buddy's parents who owned a heating oil distributorship believed the craziest conspiracy theories about how world oil markets worked; no sense of basic economics whatsoever.

Sure, would you want to put the MBA in front of the pizza oven or the drill press, no, you wouldn't. But if you are making an allusion to poltiics, we're not electing a President so that they can fly an F-16, inspect a cargo container, or process an export license by themselves either.

If a guy successfully runs a sole-proprietorship gas station, does that mean he'd be great as the CEO of Exxon?