20 - Andreas Widmer - The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship

Welcome to the Vocation of Business Leader podcast. I'm Greg Baustert. Here we explore how Catholic leaders let Christ and the teachings of the church he founded guide their work integrating faith in business. Each episode offers inspiring stories to help you live an undivided life. Let's meet our guest, Andreas Wittemer, clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America and director of the the Oka center for Principled Entrepreneurship. Welcome, Andreas.

Thank you, Greg. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, you bet. Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, I'm, I'm a professor here at the Catholic University of America. I teach entrepreneurship. I'm a husband to my wife Michelle and we have a son Elias, who's 20. Can't believe it, 20 years old. I'm originally from Switzerland and I've had a long career in software, you know, startup software companies. And yeah, now I run this entrepreneurship center at the Catholic University.

So what is principled entrepreneurship?

Principle entrepreneurship is, I would want to say person centered entrepreneurship. It's I created or I defined, not great. But I define five principles or pillars of principled entrepreneurship. And the first and most important one is to recognize that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy. And out of that then flow some of the other points. And these hillers are of course, and my whole approach to business is of course born out of my faith and I would say out of what you could call it a Catholic anthropology.

Right.

A Catholic view of humanity, of the human person and what we're doing here and why we're here.

Okay, so how did you discover your love of teaching?

Up to 10 years ago, I never taught anything, anything to anybody because I ran companies. Although, you know, you could say you're teaching anyway, but I never really was in a classroom or so it was and we'll get there. But I wrote my first book called the Pope and the CEO in which I wrote about. It was my catharsis in a way to talk about my spiritual journey as a Catholic business person. And there was a guy who read this book. His name is Andrew Abella. And Andrew Abella was working at, as a marketing professor at Catholic University. And he had this vision to create a business school, a Catholic business school. And when he read my book, he, he, he reached out to me and said, look, this is exactly his vision as well. And, and he would love to bring together a group of people who help him start a business school at, at the Catholic University of America. And if I would mind just coming down and just try it out, give a class. And we didn't have a business school yet. It was a department of Economics and Business. And so I lived in Boston, and I started to fly down and teach and fly back for a semester. And I absolutely fell in love with it. I fell in love with the students and. And the meaning of. Of this engagement with somebody as you help them and watch them flourish and grow. And now I wish I would have.

Started earlier in life, but then you wouldn't have all the experiences to share.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I'm not a. I'm. I'm not a professor who. Primarily one of the things, of course, when I started to teach, I talked to some of the tenured professor, like much older professors who've done this for many years. And one of them told me something that always stuck to me. He said, you can. You can only teach a person three things. You can teach a person knowledge, which is like an encyclopedia, you know, they can regurgitate. This is really what schools do. Mostly. You can teach them knowledge. You could keep. Teach them skills, which is you could teach them, do something like, I can teach you how to do accounting, you know, how to balance a checkbook or something. That's a skill, it's not a talent in that sense. Or you could teach somebody character, meaning you could teach somebody to manage their will and pursue excellence. And he told me, whenever you get a choice, teach the third one. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do today. The reason why I love teaching and why I love my students is because I can see their. Their progress and their potential in the formation of their character and, you know, forming their habits, forming their understanding of their life. And that's when you see that happen, you just fall in love with that. But of course, I also want to make it a case for. For the folks who listen to this, this is actually, now that I look back, this is what I've been doing as a. As a CEO or as a manager my whole life, that you help people flourish like that. And I started to realize that I have. I had a wrong view of what teaching is that we actually all of us teach, you know, in that sense, that we help other people form character, and. And of course, that we pursue it ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. So let's back up. So tell us about the Pope and the CEO and the origin of that.

Yeah, it sort of creates. It's an arc of a story. And when you read the book or understand about the book, you have to understand that it's my catharsis, so it's my answer, my letter to myself, if you wish. I. The arc goes something like this. I'm from this small village in Switzerland. I was born in Switzerland, close to Lucerne, the city of Lucerne, and couldn't find my way in life and so on. Except the one thing I excelled at, it was the military in Switzerland, which is mandatory. And I learned that I could become a bodyguard. And I thought that was the coolest thing to do. So I applied, and it turned out that I would protect the Pope. So I didn't do that for religious reasons. I did that because I thought it was cool to be a bodyguard. And I didn't know what else to do. I didn't really have a lot of other options, frankly. And in the guards, I met John Paul ii, who, in a sense, like, to all the guards, reaches out. There's like 130 of us. At the time, it was 110 when I was there. He knew everybody by name, and he knew. And he would reach out and he evangelizes. It's just amazing. And so I meet this man who. I didn't really understand exactly what the Pope is and everything, and he, you know, you have to be Catholic to be there, but how do you measure that? I was baptized and confirmed, but I had this chance to meet John Paul II in a. In a sense, in a business, in a work way. You know, he was my boss, but he ministered to me in the sense that he showed me that he was happy to work with me, encouraged me, and sort of let me see his. His life, if you wish, which, of course, if you're 24, seven with somebody as a bodyguard, that's easy to do. I ended up being so inspired by this guy. I thought, like, I was looking. I was a young man looking for meaning and. And what to do in life after having failed at so many things. And I. I just remember how he would say that he would pray for me and so on, but I. I was. I wasn't doing well at all. And he. And I eventually remember how I thought, whatever this guy has is what I want. I started to, like, admire him, seeing it. You know, this is at the time, in the late 80s. He would. He would go skiing and swimming and hiking, and he would come to the barracks and, you know, and. And have a meal and the beer with us. And, like, I was a young, tough kid, and I was impressed by him. But then I also saw him, like, praying and. And being completely absorbed in prayer, but Then I also saw him interacting with both world leaders and homeless people and everything. And I just was attracted to this person who was in my opinion, the most human person I've ever met. And I'm like, I want to have what he has. And so. And he would not accept my admiration or adoration if you wish, and would always point over to Christ and point at the cross and says, look, what you want is not me. What you want is Jesus Christ. And yeah, and gave me the rosary and, and encouraged me to pray. Some people around him then taught me how to pray. I of course would often be there when he prayed and also when he prayed the rosary and so on. And that made me find Christ. And then I had a personal conversion. So, you know, in a sense I was Catholic before, but I, but it was my dad's, you know, it's like my parents religion, not mine. Yeah, this is how Catholicism became my religion. And I went into it head over heel and I started to realize that I'm the, a part of the Pope's ministry and it's just, it was fulfilling like you wouldn't believe. And I love the whole thing. And then I met my wife there in Rome and decided to leave and come to America. She's American. And you know, when he, when I left, he sort of told me that, you know, he knew that I was converted there. And he says now, you know, bring what or who you found here wherever you go.

Yeah.

And so I came to America and I was very blessed. I went to Boston, Massachusetts and very quickly got involved with some startup companies. The first one was a Internet. The first big Internet company called FTP Software brought the Internet to PC is one of those companies. Then we went public in 93. Then I got involved with Dragon Systems that invented speech recognition and we sold that company in about 2000 or so. But it was a big, it basically I came here, I lived the American dream. It was like a rocket ship kind of, you know, I went to church on Sunday and all of that. But during the week I was a software entrepreneur, you know, and mostly focusing on international markets and traveling all over the world all the time out. I pretty much worked seven days a week and never took a vacation. And we sell the company for $600 million or so. And it turned out that the company that bought us was fraudulent. And what a blow up. Can you imagine?

Wow.

And I, what do you do? You know, I owned a piece of that, a little piece of it, but enough for like significant money for me. And the question is what do you do when, when this kind of blow up happens? And what I did is two things. The one thing is to ask myself is this system. It was China just right about around this time when they talked about the Wall street protest and the 1%, you know. Oh yeah, and, and against world trade and things like that. And I thought, do they have a point? Is this a system that is intrinsically evil? Can I even be a Catholic capitalist? If you wish. I don't like the word capitalism, but it sort of sounds good. A Catholic capitalist, I like to term the free market economy. Right. Can I be a free market competitive, free market economy proponent and the Catholic at the same time? And I didn't know the answer to this. And in order to, it was intuitively in order to get the answer, on the one hand I joined a very prestigious business consulting firm that did business strategy consulting and I ran one of their companies and I spun it out of them. But for me to really learn business from ground up because I don't have an MBA still not today, but I, I ran one of the companies of Monitor Group, which is the Harvard Business School professors consulting firm. And so I was exposed to all these, you know, Michael Porter was one of our, was one of, one of our owners. And, and I, you know, we, we taught, we, we, we worked with his frameworks and all that. So I, I, it was like my mba, if you wish to say, maybe I've, maybe we did something wrong. And I needed that learning to just see what this, what really strong and insightful business is, especially business strategy. And then the other thing I did which came out of spiritual direction is I started to study ministry. I, theoretically I wanted to study theology because I'm like, I need to find that out, the theological answer to that. And my spiritual director ended up saying, no you don't. What you need to have is applied Catholicism because you're in business and you need to go back into business. And so I started to study ministry at a program at St. John's Seminary in Boston. It still exists. It's a great program and I recommend it to everybody, the masters of art in ministry, which is both practical and theoretical. So I did study theology, but I also studied how to bring this theology and this faith into society and for me specifically into business. And as a result, to make a long story short, as a result, the catharsis of this is this book I wrote the Pope and the CEO to bring the two things together and give myself the answer, can I be a Catholic capitalist? And if so, how does that look like? And my answer is in the book the Pope and the Seal.

So what changed in your management style after that?

The core thing that changed is that first pillar to understand that we don't do business to make money per se, but we do business to become more. The fundamental understanding, the genesis, literally, of business, of work. Business is work, right? So let's talk about work. Work is a uniquely human activity. No animal can work. Why can we work? Because we are also an animal. So John Paul would break open the genesis for us to say, look, how God. God created the world and everything. And there's this whole story about genesis, of how God used his creativity and. And created the world, you know, in this beautiful story. And at the end, God says, there is nobody here like me. We want to make somebody in our image and likeness. And what that means is you have. Everything on earth is an object, meaning it's made. It doesn't have a free. It doesn't have its own will. It's made to be what it is. You know, my pen is made to be a pen, and it has no choice but somebody in my image and likeness. And of course, there's also, you have the plants, the animals, the universe itself. And then God took the same clay that he made the animals out of and made a human person. And when God made humans, there's one difference in it, and that is we're made just like the human, just like the animals. But at the end, God breathes his spirit into the human and then gives them the stewardship mandate to say, look, I'm giving you my spirit. You are now like me. Not physically, but you're now like me. I have the creator spirit. The reason why I can create at work is because I'm made in the image and likeness of the Creator. And our stewardship mandate is to say, look, it's like God takes us in his arms and says, look, I've built this, this universe, and now you're going to be my steward, continue my work. You can create things that didn't exist before. You now imitating me to put two plants together and create a third plant. You can create, you know, materials. When you use wood, you can build something that didn't exist before. We came up with penicillin and God knows, you know, the Internet and speech recognition. Every time we do this, we in a way play God. But the way to say this in a Catholic way is we participate in God's creativity. Even Greg, you and I creating this podcast, right now, we're creating Something that wasn't there before. So we basically participate in God's creativity because only God from the outside can be creative inside of this material world. This is how we can be like God when we imitate him, when we participate in this, and when we do this, we become more like the person we're imitating. You know, when you imitate somebody, you become more like them.

Yes.

And so what we're doing when we work is really, I want to say, play God, but we can become more and more like God. So the first understanding as a Christian, as a Catholic, is, is to understand that when you work, when you create a business, the first priority, the first objective is be creative. You have a responsibility, a huge privilege to continue God's creation with work. And that when you're doing that well, you're become, you're not just making more, but you are becoming more. Meaning you make more materially. But by imitating God, you actually become more like God. So you become more human. And that's why the church calls work one of the parts of the path to holiness, an integral part on the path to holiness. And I think that's the first thing to understand that. But once you understand that, it changes everything because it's the why right now.

Yeah.

Let me just also add right away is that I still believe in a free market economy and in capitalism, if you wish. God has never made anything that's not profitable. That still means that, that you also have a responsibility to create profitability. Profitability is, is a sign when you make something that it's worth more afterwards than it was when you made it, which is actually the definition of good work. If you look at God's work, everything God ever made in creation is expanding. There's the abundance. Love means abundance. And God is love and made the universe abundant. It's growing. Every tree, every plant, every animal is abundant in a sense. And we should imitate that and create abundance. But the first priority is to focus on the creation. The second part is we can look at the, the whole idea of holiness and make sure that anybody who participates with me pursues this holiness. Like, primary. First of all, like, work should not be something that leads us to hell. Works should be something that leads us to heaven. Right. And that's the first, that's important to keep in mind. But there is a worldly, worldly reward. We're physical beings, we're spiritual, you know, incarnate spirits. So we have a right and the mandate to create physical reward. Like to have a salary and be able to go to dinner and things like that. You know, this is a reward for our work, is a part of what God has intended.

Yeah. So of the five pillars, what do you think is the most challenging that people find the most challenging to accomplish?

I want to say two, and they're connected. It's really to always think like an entrepreneur. Thinking like an entrepreneur means there's two kinds of people, two kinds of approaches. I don't want to look good. And bad behavior doesn't go between people. It goes through people. We have all of it. If things goes through people, not between, it's not. These are the good people, these are the bad people. It goes right through it. Thinking always like an entrepreneur means there's two kinds of approaches to anything we do. One is a harvester and one is a creator. There's a creator spirit and a harvester spirit. The harvester spirit is grabbing stuff. Like, let me just focus on harvesting. The whole project is focusing on harvesting, gathering stuff. The creator spirit is the spirit that imitates God, that says, actually this tree will grow or this plant will grow if I make the environment better. Like to till the soil and to water it and give it nutrients and everything. And they see that the harvest. They're not. It's not that they never harvest, but they see the harvest as a result of the caretaking, whereas the other side sees the harvest as just a harvest by itself. It's just gaining stuff. Right. The other one is this intrinsic spirit of this imitation of God, of being the Creator. God never stops. If God would stop thinking about us, we would all immediately cease to exist. So God never becomes a harvester. He always has a creator spirit. That's really difficult to do because we end up being selfish. There's nothing wrong with self interest, but there's something wrong with selfishness. When we become selfish, we become harvesters. And that leads to the second part, the second, you know, pillar that we. I call it this very common sentence, which is called culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I know it's very common, but it's also very true. Culture is what we do when nobody's looking. And the best way as a leader in your organization, including all the way down into your family, is to end up doing things without people seeing it. And it starts to permeate your being to a sense that you actually create a culture around you. Try it. Right now, it's Lent, the beginning of Lent. We can start to do things in quiet, just like Jesus asks us to do our charity in private and do our Prayer in private in that sense. And you will see how that permeates everything. So if you lead a team, you can start, for example, by just praying for every individual member on your team, not sharing it with them. But start to do this, you see the effects of that. But it also means that you are a creator at every stage, especially when nobody is looking, that you invest rather than harvest that around you. You emanate that to the point that if you behave like this, you create a culture in the company that becomes your competitive advantage. Like it becomes. Others can't imitate it, but it is so difficult because it all starts with you and with the behavior when you're the weakest.

Yeah, that makes sense. So you teach a class called Vocation to Business.

Yeah, business.

Yeah, yeah.

Or that. Actually, it's called Business as a Vocation. That's sad. I can't even tell. Yeah.

So tell us what. What's the essence of that class?

Yep. So that I know much better than the title. We just call it the vocation class, but it actually has a whole long title on the, you know, on the class descriptions. And I'm sorry, I can't. I didn't memorize it, but it's a vocation class. It does. So, as you know, I'm a. I'm a clinical professor, meaning I don't have a PhD. I'm not a tenure professor. I'm a practitioner. And so I show up here with a few of my pet peeves that I think are wrong or are improvable in business education based on me having hired hundreds, if not thousands of people. And this vocation of business class is the intro class at the Bush School of Business at CUA is a mandatory class. And I get this great privilege to put my two pet peeves into one class. The first is, do you realize that business is one of the only degrees you can get without ever actually doing it? Imagine if a doctor would become a physician without ever seeing a patient, without ever doing a surgery. In business, you can actually. You can get a CPA without ever doing anybody's accounting. You can be a business manager without ever managing anybody. You can become, you know, a degree in marketing with that without ever having to actually do marketing. And so I'm like, okay, enough of that. Not if I teach. That's not going to happen. Because the experience of it is. Is all encompassing you. Again, it's knowledge, skill, or character, behavior. So let me start with that. So in my class, when you come to CUA to study business, I will welcome you at the end of August and by and talk about business. And by early September I will ask you to start a business. I'll tell you a little bit about business of how this works. How may I help you? I use my God given talents to create value for you. If that value is greater than it was when I started with it, that's called the business. And I've taught a thousand by now probably a thousand six hundred students. I've never had one that couldn't start a business. So every freshman at CUA's business school starts a business in this vocational business. Partial part of the reason is that without running a business you never understand. I can never undo a few of the primary prejudices or misunderstandings about business that we can argue all about unless you experience it and then we won't have to argue about it anymore. Business is not. Anybody who starts a business doesn't do it primarily inspired to make money because there's easier ways to to make money than starting a business. It's actually the primary way to lose money is to start a business. The business starts with a genuine desire to help somebody else to solve something, to create something, to add value to somebody else. It's a very Christian activity. It's other directed. How may I help you? Look, I can argue all I want. The best way to find it out is if I'm forcing you to do it because then it's like riding a bicycle. You can't even explain it, you just know it works. You don't have a PhD in physics, but you can ride a bicycle which is as complicated as a PhD in physics. Once you run this company you will understand and that I achieve. I created a whole process for the students to do this. It's a small little company. Many times it's something on campus or an online and a marketing affiliation or something. But it's enough for me to teach you or for me to have you experience what business is really all about. So that's one strain and we go through and I sort of push you until you not until you fail, but I certainly make you try it out until it's stress tested. Right. My last lecture is. Is this conviction is a lecture that I call failing into success. And it's a big misunderstanding that you have in business to say oh I have this one idea and this is it. And then people commit to this and they misunderstand again. The economy is for people, not people for the economy. The idea is the economy, the asset in business is you, not the idea. Let Go. If the idea doesn't work, let go of it. The asset is you, right? And if you keep, if you go on to the next idea, if you stick with the one that doesn't work, you never get to the next one. So I do the failing into success to say success is built on failure if the failure is used in a learning way and to contemplate it and, and take lessons from it. And that leads me to the other strain of, of the class. I like to strain things together so it becomes more interesting or, or more multidimensional for a class. The second thing is we write a, a dissertation throughout the semester called My Moral Compass. And it's basically just to say, let me never lose, let me define and then never lose my moral north, the true north in my life of saying, what is life all about? If this was a game, what is it about? Whoever has the most toys wins at the end. Or I mean, now is a good time. At 20, it's a good time to think about this because you have a chance to actually do something about it. It's a little late at 70 or you know, even 50 to think about this. And, and so we, we go through all kinds of experience with each other. Experience experiences where I'm just leading the students in different self awareness things to say, you know, the recognition that you're not competing with the person next to you, but you compete with the person that God made you to be with. My excellence, me at full excellence. That's what I'm competing with. Not with Greg, because Greg has a different, you know, in religious language we say, and Pope John XXIII would say this always, I don't need, you know, I can use St. Francis de Sales, who's one of my favorite saints. I can use him as a, as an inspiration. But I don't need to become St. Francis de Sales because God already has a St. Francis de Sales. What God doesn't have is a St. Andreas Whitmer. And if I want to pursue something worthwhile, I sh. I'm competing with St. Andrew, St. Andreas Widmer. That's what I'm competing. Who I compete with to measure up to that, not the person next to me. And so that starts with saying, what has God given me all the talents that God has given me? The situation, the life. And then once I take stock of that, I can now turn around and say, how do I create value for others with this? And then I can answer the question, what skills do I need to learn to, to create value for others with My talents. That then answers the question for our students, what should I study during my four years at cua, at the Bush School? What should I study? What skills do I need to learn? And my hope is that at the end of this class, the students know two things. They know what business is all about, and they know what skills they will need to go learn in order to magnify their talents to create good for others.

So a lot of that is, Is really good advice. So what advice would you give to a young professional that is finding it difficult to live an undivided life and not at. Not blessed enough to go to CUA and take your class?

Yeah, like people, even my students, it's not what I say to them, it's, it's when. When they're ready. And readiness is something that happened that God gives you a grace that you collaborate with. And so this happens at different times of your life. I mean, I was over 30 years old when I had the recognition. Okay, so I'm not the first and you know, time just if you hear this and you say, oh boy, I need to do this, there's a hundred different ways to accomplish that. Everything I'm saying and I'm teaching is basic Catholic teaching. My inspiration comes, and my foundation comes from this theory or this theology that Pope John Paul the Great defined is called the theology of the body. Now, it's a little heavy to read just like that because it's, you know, because it's complicated. But I, I apply the theology of the body to business. And that's all the stuff you're hearing me explain. I've created a fi. An eight part video series called the Gospel of Work about this that is free. It's now on our website, siokacenter.com 2C Siocha and you can go on there and watch that series. We do. We have a lot of events. Sioka center and the Bush School, we do a lot of events. But you can also do things like join young Catholic professionals. You can. If you're a little more advanced in your career, you could join Legatus or go to the Napa Institute Summer conference or something. And everywhere there you're. You're going to meet people who are pursuing this same, the same, the same meaning, the same faith and the same depth. And the question is, the advice is this. Don't do it alone. Even my video that I created, I meant it to be not watched alone. But as a group, I have belonged to a small men's group. I belong to a group like that. For like 23 years now. And our faith and our life is not meant to be as, you know, a one person sport. We are supposed to be a community, and I think that's how God made us. So when you hear this and you're inspired, find other Catholics to do this with you, people who are, maybe some of them are a bit ahead of you, maybe you can help some that are a little bit behind you in terms of the life experience, but don't do it alone and just make the first step.

Yeah, that is so important. Community is so important. There's so many people that are so alone. Yeah.

So it's not. The being alone part is much easier to overcome. And I remember some advice that John Paul gave about this first thing. And, you know, I would always ask, what am I meant to do, Lord, what do you have me do? And so on. And, and I think he noticed that I was sort of waiting for my orders. I'm a military guy, so just give me the orders, I'll go, you know, tell me what to do, I'll do it. That's not how God works. God wants to ask you, like your dad or your grandpa wants to ask you, hey, what do you want to do? And then, and then whatever it is, he's going to be your number one fan. That's how God works, to say, hey, Greg, what do you want to do? You want to do a podcast? You go ahead, I'll be, I'll root right before, right behind you. I'll, I'll be all with you. And so this freedom that John Paul would always say, you get to decide. So if you're listening to this and say, what am I going to do? And everything, the beauty of what God is telling you is to say, is to look at you all lovingly and hopefully and saying, you get to decide. You, you tell me, and then I'll be your number one fan and I'll do everything in my power to make this work. Right. So you get to decide. So do decide the second thing. Then we come to the issue, the actual issue is, well, then, what do I want? And that's another thing that John Paul always liked to say, is to say, I cannot want for you the reason why God gave us free will, the reason why God took this great risk to give us our own will, that we can decide to say, yes, I want to do this or I want to do that, that I could even decide, even decide that I don't believe in God, that I reject God, that I reject love is so that we can then choose because that makes love possible. Because love is not a feeling. Love is a decision. It has to do with feeling. But it is something you decide. The gift of self to anything, but especially to God is a free will. The reason why God isn't going around and showing his power is because we would all fall down and tremble and then be afraid of him and we wouldn't love God. But what he wants is he wants your love, which means it has to be a decision. And the feelings you have about, does God really exist? And then you say, no, I decide I want to believe in God and I'm going there. That's love. That's what he's looking for. Just like then when you go into work, you say, what am I going to do? You get to decide. But now you need to apply your will to say, I'm going to do this, I'm going to commit to that. And then you start to work on this. And God will come in and help, but it will always be that part of it that God isn't coming with the walkie talkie and tell you, you know, God to earth, you know, here's what I need you to do. But God is glorified through the stuff you're doing at work. And that when you choose what to do it, in a sense it doesn't matter. But it matters to you. As long as you create goods that are truly good and you provide services that truly serve, you can't go wrong. And that's when your creativity comes in that you actually get to, you get to decide and you get to use your will and go out and create your business, your vocation. And that's a free act, which is so beautiful. So do it intentionally.

Yeah. So what are places that people can go to learn more about you and the information that you have?

Yeah, so there's two, two basic sites that I have here. Let me just see. So andreas-or/not-widimer.com is my website. And then we have a, another one which is called Sioka center. And let me just C I o c c a center.com and I'll put.

Links to all those in the show.

Notes and those two. And on the Sioka center one you will see the you if you go in and look, you see the Gospel of Work videos and they're free. You can go in there and watch those. I'd love to hear your feedback on it. I'm also, you know, I'm on, on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn. I share a lot, I have to say. The social media, you know, I do it, we do it. I don't always do it myself. The social media stuff just. You can only do that much. I do LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the part that I use because I think I help a lot of my students find jobs, and that's sort of the professional social media. But. And then on the book side that I. I wrote a second book called the. The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, which is where I become a little more specific in terms of. Of these. These. These principles or these pillars. And that's what's a lot of that is on the website andreaswinmo.com where I talk about the pillars and there's lots of videos and, and this will be on there. I try to put all of my activities on there so people can catch up and see what I. What I'm doing or what I have to say.

Awesome. Is there. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you'd like to talk about?

That's a good question. No, I think right now I'm very concerned. Pope Francis is not doing well. I don't know whether you heard the video. He doesn't sound like himself whatsoever. So I do think he's seriously ill. And so I, you know, like we all should do every day, pray for the Pope. I think he's suffering at this point, so let's pray for the Pope's help.

Thank you so much for your time, Andreas. You definitely are a model for the vocation of the business leader, so I appreciate you.

Praise God. I'm only handing on what I've received, so this is. The more the merrier join this movement, and I'm happy to have everybody who hears this join us.

Absolutely. Amen. All right.

Okay, great.

Thank you for joining us. You bet. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Today's episode of the Vocation Business Leader podcast. We hope you found inspiration as we explore the powerful union of faith and business. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Share it. Leave a review until next time. May God guide your work and help you witness his love in all you do. God bless.