Yesterday, at the funeral of an old friend, a self-made man of humble origins, the Pastor made a perceptive comment:

“He never had much taste for formal schooling, and he left it to start work as soon as he could – it’s funny how often you hear that about successful businessmen...”

The Pastor, who has delivered many eulogies, was speaking from his own experience. Most of us who are in business would say the same.

This can be overstated: most of us also know successful entrepreneurs who have had the best possible University education, but there does seem to be a greater proportion of school dropouts than PhDs among heads of businesses.

Executives who are all MBAs and Graduates of Ivy League and Russell Group Universities might work for a man who left formal education at fifteen.

Partly, this is a generational issue: these days it seems everyone gets a degree.

Yet it is also a reflection of the fundamental difference between a good executive and a good entrepreneur.

The executive needs to be a conformist, and the universities today are, sadly more than ever, bastions of conformist thought. They also tend to breed an excessive sense of entitlement.

The entrepreneur, on the other hand, must be nonconformist and self-reliant. This sounds more like the class rebel than the school swot.

The irony is that all these self-made men tend to express a great respect for formal education. Perhaps that respect would be less if they had gone through it, and seen how it can drain them of the very qualities that led to their success.