Business school curricula follow a familiar outline: stakeholder management, operations, leadership, and governance. Justin Fulcher, a technology founder who served six months as a senior advisor at the Department of Defense, says government teaches all four, often more forcefully than any classroom.
The Course List, Rewritten
First comes stakeholder management. At a startup, a founding team controls most decisions. At the Pentagon, Fulcher encountered authority distributed among agencies, legal counsels, oversight bodies, appropriators, and career civil servants. Progress depended on alignment, not command.
Second is operations Department of Defense relies on systems built for an earlier time. Fulcher, who worked on acquisition reform and IT modernization under Secretary Hegseth, saw that new tools succeed when they reduce friction inside existing workflows.
Third is leadership. Much of his work required cooperation from people outside any reporting line. “Your credibility is the only lever you actually control,” Fulcher has said.
Fourth is accountability. Decisions in defense procurement affect national security and the men and women of the armed forces. Legal, congressional, and institutional checks turn governance from a seminar topic into a daily constraint.
Beyond the Syllabus
Justin Fulcher does not claim government simply duplicates business school. In his view, the correspondence holds closely in some areas, and in the areas that matter most, public service exceeds what a program can offer.
His argument rests on operations, not civic sentiment. Private-sector experience prepares founders for uncertainty, institutional friction, and the work of building adoption where new technology meets resistance. Those skills help inside government. Justin Fulcher contends they are not enough on their own.
Public service supplies what is missing: a direct understanding of the systems that regulated industries, defense organizations, and large institutions all rely on. For a founder who plans to sell into those sectors, that understanding can shape everything from product design to sales cycles.
“The MBA teaches you how to optimize a business,” Justin Fulcher has said. “Government teaches you what businesses exist to serve.” See related link for more information.
Visit for more about Justin Fulcher on https://www.instagram.com/justinfulcher/?hl=en