What your Econ101 prof taught you has been proven to be still valid, just like gravity.  What goes up, must come down (unless you are a successful rocket scientist).  In those lectures of yore, you were probably taught that the only way to make money was out of renting out land or to own or rent land and produce something of value. Value as in something that others will seek you out and give you money for what you have produced.  As an extention, manufacturing is about investing capital adding WORK to create VALUE.  That's it!  The rest is detail.  No value created, no money earned for fulfilling a need.

There's a terrific article Why Management is not a Profession which points out that unlike all the other professions, soon to be minted managers don't pledge to render service, to create value, to abide by a code of ethics.  And look at where they got us into. But they made out like bandits.

As I see it, the way forward is to abandon all the B$, seek out a need, one that is sufficiently painful that people will fork out money to alleviate it, and fill it.  Create value, lots of it.  The Best News ..... you'll be so close to unique, with bugger all competition, whilst the rest of what passes for the business world tries to prop up a system that has failed before and will fail into the future.