Andreas Widmer on Why Principled Entrepreneurship Creates Enduring Value EP 198

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Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast.

We greatly impoverish the concept of entrepreneurship if we reduce it to starting a company. I'd like to think of the world as having 2 kinds of people in it. That's creators and harvesters. And the entrepreneurs are the creators. There are people who come up with ideas, who find solutions to opportunities and problems, who think always as the glass half full and find a way to go forward in a positive sense and upbuilding and lifting up.

Welcome to Passion Struck.

Hi, I'm your host, I'm your host, John R.

Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 198 of Passion Struck, recently ranked by Apple as one of the top five alternative health podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you missed it earlier this week, I interviewed. The one and only Daniel Pink, who is the author of 5 New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backwards Moves Us Forward. He's also the author of the number 1 New York Times bestsellers, Drive and To Sell Is Human. And in case you missed my solo episode from last week, it was on cognitive biases and 6 ways that you can break through their trap. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued support of your ratings and reviews, which go such a long way to improving the popularity of the show. And if you're new to the show, Thank you so much for being here, or you would like to introduce it to a friend or family member. We now have starter packs on both Spotify as well as the Passion Struck website, which are collections of our favorite episodes that give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com/starterpacks to get started. Now let's talk about today's guest. Andreas Widmer is a seasoned entrepreneur with a passion for helping business professionals find deeper meaning in their work and sustainable success through Principled Entrepreneurship. Andreas has taught entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America's Busch School of Business since 2012. He is the author of the new book, The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship: Creating Enduring Value.

He's also the author of The Pope and the CEO: Good Profit and Human Ecology.

In our interview today, Andreas shares his philosophy on how to start and do business in a way that's both virtuous and profitable. He recounts his favorite success stories And pays special tribute to his dear friend and prominent business leader, Art Sioka, who is best known for inventing Wine Box and forming The Wine Group, which is one of the largest wine companies in the world. Widmer also illustrates some of these principles with stories from French tire manufacturer Michelin and Bangladesh's Grameen Phone. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited to welcome Andreas Widmer to the Passion Struck Podcast. Welcome, Andreas.

Thanks for having me, John.

Well, I know the audience always loves to get to know our guests before we dive into the main topic, which today is going to be your new book, which is right behind you in this picture. And we'll make sure we put this on YouTube for the viewers who are out there. But we're going to get into principled entrepreneurship throughout most of the episode. But I did want to start out with this question. We all have moments that define us. What is a moment that shaped who you are today?

Well, good question. I have to say, I'm starting with— I was born in Switzerland in a small village, and I grew up— I'm the youngest of 6. I grew up without really understanding or knowing who I am. As the youngest, I sort of tried always to live up to my older siblings. I tell you, I just couldn't find my role or my position in life when I was in Switzerland. And the only thing I excelled at— I'm 6'9, I'm a pretty big guy, and I excelled in the military in Switzerland. And so after my recruit school, I'm a noncommissioned officer in Switzerland. I saw that I could go into Foreign Legion to become a bodyguard, and I thought, I'm going to do that. That's the coolest thing there is to do, especially for somebody like me who excelled physically. And I signed up to become one of the bodyguards for the Pope. And there's a unit, the oldest existing military unit in the world is called the Swiss Guards in the Vatican, and they protect the Pope. And lo and behold, I applied. I never thought they would take me and they accepted me. And so I go there with this mix of being really excited about it. Also not really doing it for religious reasons because I grew up kind of Catholic, but not in a big way. But then also with this kind of insecurity about myself that I felt everything I did was sort of always putting on a mask and sort of pretending that I knew what I was doing or pretending I was a tough guy. And I sort of underneath had an existential crisis as I joined. And it turned out that when you're a bodyguard to somebody, you hang out with that person a lot. And for me, that was John Paul II, the Pope in those days, in the '80s, '90s. And first time we met, he noticed it right away. And he actually started to talk with me and model for me what it means to be a person who's sure of themselves in terms of, this is who I am and I live fully out my humanity. And he changed my life. He saw that I was struggling with this and he introduced me to mental prayer, prayer in general. He introduced me to a way of looking at the world, uh, and as me in the world to bring my excellence to it. He gave me this idea that I am willed and I have certain talents and ideas that I could fill out. There was never in the history of the world anybody like me, and there will never be anybody like me in the future of the history of the world. So if I don't become me fully, this opportunity will never come around to do what I ought to do in the world. And going forward, that defined everything I did from there on.

Wow, what an amazing story. And being a military veteran myself, one thing I've always wondered, because I've been to the Vatican multiple times to visit, is when you see the Swiss Guard there, I never understood kind of the backdrop for the training that they go through. Is it considered to be a special forces unit? And do you go through Some of that type of training.

Yeah. It's like the Secret Service here in the United States. It is considered an elite force there. I mean, what you're seeing on the front with the uniforms is sort of the— it's like seeing the Marines at the White House. That's not fully what they do. They act like Secret Service, black suit and all that.

Well, I want to ask you just a couple more questions about your experience. You wrote a book called The Pope and the CEO. where you discuss your relationship with Pope John Paul II. What qualities made him the most authentically human person you've ever met?

First of all, that he paid attention to you in the moment. Every time I met that man— the thing is, being a Swiss Guard looks somewhat glamorous to the outside, but the truth is it's not. You're a fly on the wall. Your service is done well when nobody notices you. But he did. And whenever he talked to me, I felt like He paid so much attention that I thought like, I'm the reason he got up in the morning. And then I talked to other people and I find out he did the same thing for them. So this living in the moment, when you have come out of this understanding of who you are as a person, you can be authentically present. That made a huge difference in his impact on other people, and especially his impact on me. It made him so authentic and this genuine interest in who I am.

Well, I happened to hear another podcast and you talked about a great story that you shared between the Pope and your parents. And I was hoping maybe you could just dive into that because I thought it was really touching.

Yeah. So one of the things we have as a tradition is that he invites your parents to come to the Vatican and he thanks them for your service in a sort of symbolic way. And, and, you know, so he knew of my existential crisis and all that and started to just pay attention to me. And as I walked up with my parents, and this is sort of the change in experience. It was when you're younger, you hold your parents' hands, but here I am walking up to the Pope with my parents and they held my hand. It was just the other way around. And as I approached, he immediately says, oh, Andreas, and he goes to my mother, he's one of my favorites. And then he goes through things that I do well. He noticed and he told my mother and my dad what he liked about what I was doing and what he felt my strengths were. And it was genuine. And it just struck me like, I'm 6'9, I probably grew a few more inches right then and there. But I'm telling you that this sincerity gave me a fulfillment and the purpose and the commitment to work with this man in this organization. Because remember, he was my boss. Don't put too much religion on this. This is your boss, you're working with him, and he turns around and he tells your parents, I really like working with him and here are the talents he has and he's doing a really great job. That kind of buildup is worth more than a raise. It gave me real commitment to love to work with him.

Yes. And for the listeners who might not be familiar with the Pope, he became Pope John Paul II very shortly after his predecessor had an unfortunate cardiac arrest after, I think it was only 33 days in office. And he took on this name to honor his predecessor, who took on the name to honor the 2 predecessors before him, if I have the—

You're right.

But he had to step into some very uncertain times because there were a lot of cardinals who were worried at the time that his predecessor's death might not have been from natural causes. And so he is coming into this enclave of cardinals and has to thrust himself into this new environment. And then he becomes one of the longest-standing popes in history, I think the second longest-standing. What qualities of leadership did you find in him? Because he's not only the Pope, but he's also the CEO of the Catholic Church. What made him such a good one?

I think it's this, again, coming back to recognizing people's true talents. See, the benefit of doing what he did, of getting to know me and knowing my talents, is that he was able to put a team together where he matched talents and non-talents and put people in positions where they could shine on their talent. Like knowing humans well, you recognize somebody's talent and you put them into a position where they could flourish. So he had something called the Secretary of State, which is the foreign minister basically. He's from Poland behind the Iron Curtain back then. They had to deal with Russia, right? The Soviet Union. And that was very, very difficult. To do. And it's a long story, a very perilous situation. There was— Poland was always close to martial law and the violent put down their protests with their Solidarity Union and so on. And he needed somebody to go in there and to be a great diplomat for it. And he found that in a man who actually wasn't exactly like him, who actually covered for one of his non-talents with his talent and sort of in a way created this perfect front. That 2 people next to each other who represented the Vatican and his foreign minister were able to optimize and become one of the key forces in actually even the demise of the Soviet Union. Because— and that, that goes all back to his ability to recognize talent and then put people in the right job for the right talent.

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Well, an amazing quality for any leader to have really, because getting the right team on the bus is one of the most important things you can do.

Yeah.

But it is absolutely, it is absolutely doable. This is something we can all learn.

Well, that leads me to a question I wanted to ask you, and that is there's this age-old debate. Are people born entrepreneurs or can entrepreneurship be learned? What is your perspective on that?

It's a yes, but. So yes, everybody can learn to be an entrepreneur. It depends a bit on your definition of an entrepreneur. One of the points I make in my book is we greatly impoverished the concept of entrepreneurship. If we reduce it to starting a company, I'd like to think of the world as having 2 kinds of people in it. That's creators and harvesters. And the entrepreneurs are the creators. There are people who come up with ideas, who find solutions to opportunities and problems, who think always as the glass half full and find a way to go forward in a positive sense and upbuilding and lifting up. And from that perspective, anybody can learn to do that. It has to do with an inner attitude. if we're saying, can anybody be a startup person in a company? I would say not everybody has to. That's something sometimes for different stages in life that you can do something like this. And sometimes you can't. But my general answer is that everybody can be an entrepreneur. And I would actually even say everybody ought to be an entrepreneur.

Yes, I think you make a good point there, because whether it was when I was in Big 4 consulting, or when I join Fortune 500 companies, we had this concept of an intrapreneur, which I would say I was because I was always, whether it was at Arthur Andersen trying to create a new practice or through my time in Fortune 500s trying to create new products or business ventures, you can absolutely be an entrepreneur in a bigger company. If that's what your goal is. In fact, I think it's very important, especially when we're using things like design principles and critical thinking, that you embrace things such like that.

I have a little— on my website, andreas-widmer.com, I have a little quiz you can take, and it tells you what, at this stage in life, what kind of entrepreneur you are. Because I also make the distinction between being an employee entrepreneur or a franchise entrepreneur or, or a startup entrepreneur and so on. What I'm trying to do is pry open the possibilities to show that this initiative and this realization of creativity is something that we're all called to.

Well, I think that's great. And thank you for pointing out the website. I was going to ask you later on in the discussion, but I'm glad you got it out there right now. Well, if we're going to dive into The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, I think probably the best starting point for listeners who might not be familiar with the concept is, can you define what principled entrepreneurship is and its origin?

So let me first define it. Principled entrepreneurship is a mindset of creating enduring value for the customer through your own excellence. So the core of principled entrepreneurship is to say, how may I help you in a business? That's the core sentence of a business. I am going to use my talents to create value for you. And the value I create is, of course, the common value that we create, or how we measure value nowadays is with profit. We measure it financially. And so how can I help you? I use my talents to create value for you. And if I do this on a long term with a long-term focus, I would call that principled entrepreneurship. Now, the original term comes out of a book called Good Profit by Charles Koch, who has a management theory called market-based management. And in there, he has that term that points towards this, these creators, these people in a company. And even for him, it was for more than just a startup creator, but the creator in a sense of the solutions to problems in any company at any stage that he would call principled entrepreneur. And I sort of picked that up and took it from there.

So I was recently interviewing Jean Ulwing. I'm not sure if you're familiar with who she is, but she's Richard Branson's right-hand person at Virgin, and she runs Virgin Unite, which is their philanthropic arm. But she is also a team leader for a group called the B Team that Richard Branson founded with Jochen Zeitz. And they're a group of well-known leaders, Like Marc Benioff is one of them, who are trying to shift away from short-term gain.

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To balance the long-term benefits for helping people on the planet on topics like growing inequality, unemployment, and unsustainable use of natural resources, how can being a principled entrepreneur are applying these principles help leaders in the future to recognize the need that leaders in the future not only need to be stewards of shareholder value, but also need to be doing good in the world?

I would say the way that leaders, business leaders do good in the world is by the business itself. So one of the things I focus on is that we sort of have 2 ways of approaching business. And this is somewhat of a critique first, and then a solution of what I mean. Many times leaders say, well, we need to go out and change the world and this and that, and actually start to focus outside of the company. I would caution against that and say, let's go back to the beginning. What we need to do is to focus on actually what our business does. We do unfortunately too little of that. And we only focus on the outcome of our businesses. So we focus on the profit and then what do we do with the profit? What we're forgetting is the work itself and the feeling and the culture of meaning inside the company. That has a result that 2/3 of our workforce is disengaged. So 6 out of 10 employees in the United States can't wait to get home in the evening. They hate their jobs. Is that their fault? No, it's not their fault. It's a bit like on a football team. If you send a football team on the field and they're not motivated for it, whose fault is that? That's our fault. That's management's fault. That's the CEO's fault. And that in some sense is also our culture's fault. You see, what we're doing is with well-meant efforts, we have sort of 2 paradigms to decide, to define what business is all about. On the one hand, you have the Friedman doctrine of saying the only thing that matters is profit, create shareholder value. That's the only thing you need to do. And then you have this other idea that says, well, and it's sort of a caricature of corporate social responsibility, but in that direction that says, well, it's okay to make a profit, but then you have to go out and share the profit and you have to do things beyond that after afterwards, almost in a sense to make up for having made the profit. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that business itself is a force for good. If you have to go out and make up for having made profit, you did business wrong. Business itself, we need to go back to learn to focus on the process of business, on work itself. And we do that by looking at just what we talked about when we started our conversation here, To look about each person who's involved in the company and say, "How do I help you flourish through your work?" Remember that the core question of this is: How may I help you? And so, if I am trying to use my talents to help customers, to add value for customers, I need to be well aware of what my talents are, and my company has to help me to live those out and to flourish with it. When we're doing that and we're putting teams together, not only do we create companies and teams where one and one is more than two, it becomes three, five, ten. Because it's almost like a multi. multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, like a miracle kind of thing, because we're starting to flourish as human beings in creating these products and services that we produce. And it gives meaning to us in our work itself. As a result of that, we then turn around and emanate that goodness because of human flourishing, that goodness into society and into the economy. And that creates the kind of benefit, what I think Richard Branson talks about, to start to see high and rising wages, to start to see a responsible stewardship environment and so on, which is a fallout from the proper purpose of the company. Just in summary, to say what I think we need to do is to focus actually more on the company itself so that it becomes a good domino effect to the outside versus trying to push over the dominoes outside of the company. And then we internally at companies have 6 out of 10 people who hate the job they're doing. Ugh, I have had no luck lately.

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Well, I'm glad you touched on this whole topic because I'm going to stay here for a couple of minutes. The surveys that I have seen, I cited one in my upcoming book myself, showed that out of the 1 billion full-time workers globally, 70% to 85% are disengaged. And then as you look at millennials globally, 66% are disengaged. So it's a huge problem. Prior to starting this, I worked for a company called Bold Business, and we were trying to highlight the good that business was doing because people look at a company like Verizon and they think of them only from the sense of profit and loss, or, you know, the cell phone, but they don't think of all the capabilities that have been enabled because of the software that's on the phone that they're delivering, including life-saving support. being able to track your kids, other things like that, that wouldn't be there had it not been for the business. And when I was a senior executive at Dell, one of my peers, Erin Mulligan, was the CMO, and she came up with this new branding for the company, which ended up not going forward, but I thought it would've been amazing because the whole concept was Dell, the power to do more. And when we saw the early videos that they were going to use in commercials, it was all about how different businesses were using Dell's technology to do good for the world, whether that was saving someone's life or helping with climate change or something like that. Well, long-winded, but it leads me to— we're really talking about chapter 5 where you discuss Corporate culture is paramount. And how do you think through this lens of this disengagement that corporate culture is impacting employee engagement and what needs to change, do you think?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. The culture is a discontent of meaning. People search for meaning and then well-meaning management is saying, oh, let me find meaning. Let's go outside of the company and start to fight for— fight climate change, go outside the company and help poorer nations or or disadvantaged people and this and that. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is the wrong medicine for the illness that we have. The illness we have is a crisis of meaning of work. Our explanation to work is these 2 cultures: CSR, so corporate social responsibility, and the Friedman Doctrine. And I know it's somewhat of a caricature of both, but this is what sticks in the culture. Both of these only deal with the outcome of work, not within the work. So what we're doing is we're telling people almost to go into this hamster wheel, to go around and run and run and run, and the only thing that ever matters is the outcome. But the running itself loses meaning. It becomes Sisyphus work, like nihilism, that we run and there's no end to it. Then people— that becomes depressing. People become depressed and meaningless, and then they get— they start to hate their job. What we need to do is to bring the meaning back into the company and to say, our objective, my objective with you, John, you with me, is that we try to help each other become the best version of ourselves. We look at human flourishing. We can measure flourishing in all kinds of ways. In my development of both understanding what my talents are and then advancing, investing in the advancement of my talents. And then to find my non-talents And in a sense, instead of making me feel guilty for my non-talents, which is not my fault, it's not my fault that I'm 6'9 and I'm not going to be a horse jockey. I don't have a talent in that. Okay. Why would you make me feel guilty about that? But what you do is you find people to create teams that complement each other. Then we become a team that actually feeds on each other and becomes more wholesome together. That's how you create a culture of mutual support. and common excellence. What we're doing then is to put the focus of our culture back into the company and on each one of the individuals that is in it. That brings life fulfillment, happiness, and progress. Then we can still talk about doing things outside of the company, but that's something that we're almost dodging the ball by going outside of the company rather than improving the culture and to focus back on work, back on our employees, And make them flourish first.

Yeah, I think that's a great answer. In my experience, in many of these Fortune 500 companies and groups that I led, is half the time the employees didn't even know how their job mattered to the benefit of the company. So the first thing I always tried to do was lead them on an exercise where they had a line of sight into how each one of their jobs impacted our core strategies that we were trying to go after because if they're not feeling passionate about what they're doing, that's going to impact all other elements of their performance. No question.

It was interesting.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Claude Silver or not, but she is the right-hand person for Gary Vee at VaynerX. She used to be on the ad side of the business, but she saw this issue in VaynerX and asked if he could create a new role for her. She is the first Chief Heart Officer in any company. Her role is really, she's over all of HR, but it's really to figure out how do you keep a pulse on the heart of employees?

Yeah.

She is very dedicated, not only to their work life, but more importantly, she's trying to understand what are their goals bigger than work that they want to pursue and how do we make both come together, which I think is a great way to start tackling this issue.

I'm not saying that I don't care about profitability or so. It's no, I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I just think that profitability is the result. Good profit is the result of a system that produces it as almost like as a side effect. It's a bit like white blood cells to the human body or like profit to the corporations. You know, the two of us are sitting here, we're not thinking about profit, about white blood cells in our body. Even though if they weren't there, we'd be dead in a couple of days, right? So you're not thinking about it. But why don't you have to think about it? Because you ate your breakfast, you ate your lunch, you drink, you move, you get good air and movement and exercise and everything. And the white blood cells will take care of themselves. They will be there. That's how profit is for a company. We are sort of obsessed with the outcome only. We should focus on the process internally. The hidden secret here John, is that we think about investment and going on Wall Street and everything, but I'm telling you, all these companies should, should remember one thing and one thing only, is that the only investment that has the possibility of infinite return is the human person. And so all companies need to come back to their employees and invest in them and make them— allow them to become their competitive advantage.

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I completely agree with you. And you see this play out so much, especially in companies over the past decade who've been going through digital transformation. And oftentimes when you think about the transformations, whether it's that or they've been around for a while, like P&G or Nestlé or The Home Depot, you can't just sit there on your laurels and what you've done in the past. And the only way you're going to change that is to get into the hearts and minds of the employees of the company, because it's not technology that's going to do the ultimate change. Some of it comes down to the processes and procedures that you implement, but my experience was overwhelmingly, if you didn't get the hearts and minds of the people and get them to contribute to where the company is going, you're never going to reach that next point. And I think that's why so many companies that were once on the Fortune 500 no longer exist or have been acquired.

Excellence is something that never is. It's only always becoming. As long as we have a free market, we guarantee that excellence never is. It's only becoming because we allow the next person to come to take over in a way to become more excellent. That is what progress consists of. I think that the economy— I sort of abhor the idea, even though I was a soldier and everything, I abhor the idea that the economy or business is like war. Business is nothing like war. Business is like the Olympics where we all compete and it actually is good for all of us. And competition— I run faster if there's somebody running next to me. And I don't always have to be first in order for me to have a personal win and the personal best. And so this whole idea of the absolute best is something that is being overrated. I think that I'm more into saying, I want you to achieve the best version of yourself. I think you talk in one of your previous podcasts about this obsession with excellence versus mediocrity and saying, well, I don't have to be the best at everything, right? And I totally agree with it, with this. The only thing that I need you to be the best at is at being you. And that may— and that doesn't really matter how this compares to anybody else. As long as you flourish with your talents and your possibilities, then that is the best for you. And in that sense, the business is much more like the Olympics than it is like war. The economy is never a zero-sum game.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's something that a lot of people miss is they're constantly trying to achieve this state that they see of influencers or business leaders or sports athletes that are around us. But I think you made a great point very early in our discussion that we are all put here for a defined reason. We are the only person who can achieve what we're designed here to become. And so what we should hold ourselves to is being what we are supposed to be. And to me, if you achieve that, then you are exemplary because you're living out who you've intended to be. Now, it doesn't— maybe you don't have the wealth of Elon Musk or the fame of someone else, but to me, it doesn't matter if you're making an impact. Because if you're doing what God created you for, then you are impacting society. And all you have to do is impact one person and you're making a difference because it can have a tidal wave of cascading effects.

What John Paul was talking about, he says, don't waste your life trying to be somebody else. If you have the only opportunity of anybody in human history to be you, that's a unique opportunity that nobody else gets. Now, whether that has more money than Elon Musk or not doesn't matter because the goal of your life is actually your happiness. And I don't mean physical happiness in that sense. I mean flourishing, that you fire on all cylinders and you can be all you can be, to borrow a famous slogan. You want to achieve that happiness. If you would try to be Elon Musk. First of all, you won't, because Elon Musk is already Elon Musk. And second of all, that measurement of excellence doesn't apply to you. Therefore, that's not the food of your soul. That's not what's going to make you happy. The only thing that's going to make you happy is what you were created to, to be happy with.

And that's why it's so important that you go up your trajectory and not somebody else's, because you will not find the happiness Well, and I think to that exact point is why so many people today are experiencing, whether it's chronic hopelessness or helplessness or loneliness, it all stems from what you said earlier on. We wear this mask of pretense, trying to be something that we're not instead of being ourselves.

Look, I've done it. I've done it for a long time, and that's why I share it. And I want to share with everybody, hey, hey, this is a great solution to this. And it makes you so much more peaceful and calm by discerning who you are and then living that out. It's finding peace, right?

Well, I think that's a great lead-in. And, and yes, it is finding peace. And I think it's a great lead-in to discussing your long-term mentor, Art Sioka, because he was someone who lived his best life and became the person he was intended to be.

Can you discuss why Art made such a major impact on your life?

So Art Sioka, I met many years ago. He was a CEO. I was a CEO at the time, but he was a much bigger deal than I was. He built the 2nd largest wine company in the world. Most of you would know some of his products, even though you've never heard of him or his company. The company's called The Wine Group. And the kinds of inventions and things he brought to market over his 40, 50-year career, he's the guy who invented the box wine. Franzia is one of his brands. He made popular the wine coolers and wine spritzers. He made the concept of Italian table wine, vino da tavola, he made it palpable for the American palate. That's his great achievement, to create this huge market of American table wine. Not like French fufu wine, Châteauneuf-du-Pape or whatever, but Italian table wine. He didn't do it by creating this one product. What he did is he created a company that had a culture in it that was conducive to innovation and progress. People, once they joined him, they stayed with the company. It was a management-owned company. So everybody in the company could get into management in that sense. And the management owned the company. And their focus was, as he declared, principled entrepreneurship and long-term value creation of the company. And he had many very contrarian approaches to it, but we can maybe cover that afterwards. The meaning he had for me is that he and I, once when we were still CEOs, got together and tried to bring some college professors and university professors together to show them, to argue with them that business is a force for good by itself. Business as an activity is a good thing for society. It's not a negative, it's a net positive. And we did 2 years or 3 years in a row. We did these seminars with these professors, and I'm telling you, we couldn't make a dent. They hated business afterwards as much as they did before. And then I got this offer and this opportunity to start a business school with some friends here in Washington, DC at the Catholic University of America. And I called Art and I said, you wouldn't believe the opportunity I have. And he's like, I'm all in. I was a part of the, of starting this business school. And I created this Center for Principled Entrepreneurship. And Art became my partner in this and my funder, my donor for it. And we've worked on that center now for the last 10 years. And then as it pertains to this book, I basically wanted to write the book about what we do at the center and how one does the art of principled entrepreneurship. And I thought, well, who better to use as a model than Art, who is the art of principled entrepreneurship to me. And so I called him, it was actually just before COVID I was teaching in Rome for the semester, and I called him and I said, Art, I have an idea. I want to write this book. I want to make you sort of the red thread throughout it. And if you would just agree. And he says, I'd love to, but I have some good news and some bad news. And I said, well, give me the bad news first. And he says, my cancer has come back. I have 2 months. And I said, like, well, what's the good news in light of that? And he says, I have a lot of time. All my time till then I can dedicate to it. I have no appointments until then. And it is this sort of arts view of the creator, right? And I said, look, if you want to do it, I'm happy to do it if you're in. And said that I would record our conversations so that I could use them afterwards when he passes away. And it actually turned out that he didn't pass away in 2 months. He lived for 2 more years. And I have hundreds of hours of recorded conversations and interviews with him. And he died 3 days before the book went to print. So he saw the final book. He saw the result that you can see in the book now. He loved the COVID And I had this huge privilege to sit at the feet of a man who was 87 years old, who shared with me what he learned over a long and successful career. When you know you're going to die, you're not going to play politics. You basically just give the net-net of what there is to be said about business and the economy. And I have this privilege now to share this with all of you, to say, here's what this man told me. And I hope I did it justice in the book.

Yeah.

The great thing about getting advice from someone like him, and I'm sorry he has passed away, is you're getting it at that point in their life without any filter at all, except what he believes is the authentic truth of what it takes to accomplish.

What I loved about it is with Art Sioka, you know how the story played out. I mean, his company today, he quit as CEO like 15 years ago or 20 years ago. And his company is still number 2 and his culture still endures in the company and everything. Whereas we don't know what the end of Elon Musk is gonna look like or Bill Gates and so on. I mean, this is somebody who's— the whole thing has played through and we see the result. It's almost like making the— talking about the result of the whole thing when it's finished. Right. Whereas often we hold people up who are in the middle of their career, which we don't know how long-lived that is gonna be and how it's gonna end up. With art, we know.

Well, in many ways you can look at Bill Gates's legacy, which was Steve Ballmer's legacy, and the company had really lost its way and was bleeding money. Satya Nadella came in and he's had to completely reinvent the company and the corporate culture. So I think you bring up a great point. Exactly.

And I'm also from that industry. All my companies were high-tech and I competed and collaborated with Microsoft. And there you have it. There was a culture, even a toxic culture, in my opinion, in the company that the new CEO had to revise and make much better, which I understand is much better now.

Yes. And I have a great Steve Ballmer story. I've got a few of them from both my time at Lowe's and Dell, but I'm not going to go there. Perhaps we can discuss them later on. I did want to go into your center that you're running now, because in the book you lay out that there are 3 components of teaching principled entrepreneurship. And I was hoping that you could go through those because I thought they were a great framework.

That's my codification in a sense of that, how may I help you? I keep going back to this because business is not complicated. Business is other-directed. How may I help you? So I need to first find out what is my talent. And I work with my students. Every one of my students starts a business because Business school is the only place where you can get even an MBA and everything without ever having touched a patient. You'd never give somebody a doctorate, a medical doctorate without them having done surgery. But in business school, we do this all the time. I, that makes no sense to me. So in the first day of business school, I get up and I say, you're starting a business today. It's like going into the pool to learn to swim. I'm not going to do this on dry land. And the way to find your talents is by me starting to do stuff with you. How would you know which instrument to play if I didn't let you handle them? I'm starting a business or they start— I guide the students to start a business, every one of them, 200 people a semester. And what I'm doing it is with an eye towards helping you find your talents. And for that, I sort of have a method to go quickly through. It's almost like touching each instrument to see if you like the sound of it or so, because when you have a talent, something resonates with you right away. It's a bit like listening to good music or tasting good food. Your palate will tell you if it likes it. Right away. And so it is with business. So let's practice some business or do some business. And then you find out what your talents are. Once you find that talent, the key to business is a very simple thing. How do you create value for others? Not for you. Create value for others with that talent. That takes a fundamental shift. We're all born navel-gazing. We're all focused in on ourselves. And so what we need to do is put the head up and say, look at the other person and say, what's it to them? Like what I'm doing here, how does this add value to you? It's actually a very Christian approach to say, how can I help you? And when you help somebody well, then you create value that wasn't there before. It's one of the great insights of the economy. So for example, this is a pen from Switzerland. It's a Caran d'Ache pen. It's very nice. It's a fountain pen. It probably costs that company, I don't know, $10 in materials to make with their talents and everything. They sold this to me for like $150. That money, or even if it costs them $50 and $100 more, that $100 extra is the value that this adds to me. Otherwise I would just buy the pieces and put it together myself. But the value they add to me by doing this is $100. And that $100 is new money. This $100 has never been there before. It's what we call profit, but I like to call it new money just to make people understand that this money isn't— I'm taking it from you. No, it's new. It's something that's created new. That's what I mean by creating value for others. How might I help you? Once you figure that out, you have figured out the conundrum or the riddle of business. And once I teach this to you, you will go and figure out the rest on your own. Sorry to go so long about this. But this is one of the core passionate topics I have.

Well, throughout the book, you bring up this idea of creativity. And in my upcoming book, I have a chapter where I have the 5 plateaus on your way to becoming passion-struck. And the last plateau is the need to become a creative amplifier. And in your book, you mentioned that human creativity fuels the American dream. Why is that? And how do you incentivize sustainable value creation instead of value redistribution?

So value creation is important because just what I explained now, the We need to make sure that our economy is a pizzeria, not a pizza. Redistribution is when there's one pizza, and if there's 3 more people coming into the party, we're going to have to reassign the slices. But the truth is that the economy, the more business you make, the more money you make. We literally make money. We make new money. There's not a fixed amount of money in the world. We need to make sure that that stays like this. And the only way this stays like this is if we have a free economy, a market-based economy where I can start a business and I'm free to compete against anybody I want to go better, faster, cheaper, and farther. When we do that, it gives social mobility because people who weren't winners before can become the winners and therefore go up in society and socioeconomic status. And that is the fuel of the American dream because it attracts other people doing the same thing. So we need to have this constant, constant rolling over in social classes so that we become what America is, a mixing pot of Everybody and anybody, everybody gets a chance, which is the American dream. The reason why creativity is important for that is that unless you create more value than the guy before you, you're not going to win in competition. But there's another aspect to this that has to do with a fundamental idea of who we humans are that animals can't create. I'm not talking about a gorilla banging 2 stones together to break a nut or something like that. I'm talking about the internet or a Boeing 747 or penicillin or so. Did you ever notice that animals can't do that? We can do that as humans, but biologically we are exactly the same like the animals. And that tells you that our creativity is something higher than nature. Charles Paul would say the reason why the animal cannot create and I can create is because I am, of course, made in the image and likeness of the Creator. We humans become more human when we create. John Paul had this famous sentence that when we work, we don't just make more, we become more. Creativity is a part of humanity, of humanness, that necessarily when you create, you actually become better at being human. And that is why it is central to who we are, and we cannot lose creativity.

Yeah, I think everything you have just laid out is so important. And I think another key component of it is when you do that, you go from a self-centric view to a world-centric view. And that's what we need more of today. Well, I kind of wanted to end today by you talking about Art and some of his achievements. And you write about in the book that the craft of winemaking is inseparable from its finished product. How can we apply that analogy to our own personal journey? And what would Art's advice be on this topic?

He loved talking about this. This wording I used earlier about creators and harvesters, that actually comes from him. And he would say, there's 2 kinds of winemakers. There's creators and harvesters. If all I do when I get the vineyard is just harvest, harvest, harvest, harvest, and I just focus on the outcome of it, and I just grab the— and just make my wine right away. And then after the agricultural cycle of like 6, 7 years, he says after one of these cycles the vineyard will be in shreds. Like it will not produce good grapes anymore. But I'm a creator. What I do is actually, of course I harvest, but my focus of my business is actually on the grape growing and winemaking in the first place. So I invest in the soil. I invest in pruning the vines. I invest in the people who do all of this to make sure that the vineyard gets the best care. I water it and all of that. And he says, this is an analogy to your business, to any business. Any business is a vineyard. And the product of it is the wine. And this is what I mean by saying that our focus needs to go back inside the company. Tend your vineyard, be a creator in your vineyard. Because if you're just a harvester and you're just looking at what comes down the river, then pretty soon the source of your prosperity will dry up. And we're starting to see that. One of the canaries in the coal mine on this is our workforce. And we can see that, that 2/3 of our workforce has turned off. And that's a sign that we have stopped being creators and we're not tending the vineyard. And I hope that this book is a contribution to inspire people to pay attention to the inside of the company, to the vineyard, so to speak?

Yes. Well, it's interesting. And as I've done my research, whether you look at Brookings or other organizations that are out there, entrepreneurship rates have actually been in decline since the 1970s. And that has a huge ripple effect on business vitality, because if new businesses aren't being created and turned over, and that people aren't flourishing like we were when the United States and much of Western culture was being so much more innovative in what we were doing. So I think maybe that's a great lead-in to the last question I wanted to ask you, and that's in chapter 8, you discuss the importance of inspiring the next generation. You talk about something called the trading game and how it gauges happiness. I was hoping I could just Use that as a lead-in to some parting words that you want to give to this new generation, many of whom are listeners to this show.

So that's a tall order. My core calling to you when you're listening to this is that stop trying to live somebody else's life. Do not measure yourself on other people in the sense of how much money do they make and so on. I see it in my classes here at the university all the time. The best time you can spend as a young person is to find out who am I and what are my talents, and then unashamedly and without any hesitation pursue an investment in those talents. I often go with my own example that I absolutely suck at numbers. Okay, I have not a numerical mind at all. And so I tried to make up for this and felt bad about it half of my life. and try to cover my weakness on this, which only ends in disaster. Instead, what I started to do, and that is the part of the solution, is to identify, actually to say, look, my non-strengths have to do with details and numbers and sort of very nitty-gritty stuff. My talents are much more in the big sense, in speaking and concepts and stuff like this. And then because I understand this, I can confidently pursue my strengths And that actually gives me happiness and fulfillment. And an investment in my strength is actually giving me a return on investment much more than trying to mitigate one of my weaknesses. It also has created huge friendships where I know that the first thing I need is somebody who is completely detail-oriented in financial and accounting stuff whenever I start a company. And some of my best friends have become sort of my yin and yang friends. who make up for my weaknesses. And it builds beautiful friendships of complementarity. So one of the things that we miss in this world is that we always see everything through conflict. And I think the world has been made in perfect unison. And whenever it is much more a complementarity, like competition, it's almost like Michael Porter came up with this word coopetition. What you do is, yes, there is a competition part of it, but cooperation is really the seasoning of the American dream.

Thank you for that answer. And I just wanted to give one last shout out for your book. I found it to be a very enjoyable read. I love the personal examples. And of course, your stories about art. If you are a person who wants to read this, there's some great things in there, such as ergons, and a great story about vermouth. So I don't want to give it all away. But I highly encourage all of you to pick up a I'll get a copy of this book and I'll put it in the show notes. Well, Andreas, thank you so much for being a guest today and for all that you're doing to lead this next generation of future leaders.

Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. And thanks for everybody for listening.

I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Andreas Widmer and wanted to thank Andreas and Zilker Media for the privilege and honor of interviewing him. Links to all things Andreas will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting this show and making it free for our listeners. Videos are all in one convenient place on YouTube at John R. Miles. We have well over 400 of them for you to take advantage of, as well as exclusive content that you will only find there. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck podcast interview I did with Laura Vanderkam, who is a New York Times bestselling author, highly regarded speaker, host of the podcast Before Breakfast, and co-host with Sarah Hart Unger of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. We release and discuss her brand new book, Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters.

I think everyone needs to recognize that you have some identity that is apart from work and is apart from family. And we've put a lot of effort into work and family. They require a lot of responsibility, very meaningful things, but they take a lot of energy. And how do we get energy? Well, there are certain things we can do holistically, like getting enough sleep and exercising, but often we draw energy from doing meaningful things that we personally find enjoyable. So I challenge people to take one night for you, one night a week, or the equivalent number of weekend hours. Do something that is not work, that is not family, that you personally find fun.

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