Andreas Widmer: The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship

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Welcome to the Pause Cast where we introduce you to incredible humans who share their journeys with the mission to inspire you to harness your own inner tenacity to drive your life and career forward. And now your host, Adam Posner.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast where I bring you the best and the brightest from the world of business, marketing and personal growth to help you harness your inner tenacity and drive your career forward. My guest today on the Pause Cast is Andreas Widmer, the founder and director of the Art and Carlisle Sioka center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America's Bush School of Business. There has to be an acronym for that somewhere there. He loves to teach and mentor students to find their true calling and and previously Andreas helped led high tech companies bringing more than 100 leading edge technology products to market. In the process, he also led several organizations focus on enterprise solutions to poverty. He is a former member of the Swiss Guard, serving under Pope John Paul II and author of the book quote the Pope and the CEO, which we're going to dig into, which describes the 10 lessons he learned from the late Pope about leadership and the centrality of the human person at work. Totally relevant. Andreas has a unique path to entrepreneurship as well, with some unique takes on what it means to be truly successful in business. And I want to dive right into that. So let's get the show going. Andres, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Adam for having me.

I appreciate you joining us today. So I love to hit the rewind button and the real impetus for your story largely starts with serving, as I mentioned before, for bodyguard for St. John Paul II. And the story is well documented in your book and many other interviews. So I'm going to direct my listeners to check that out. You talk about it in depth. So I could really focus today's interview on a few things. But before we get to that part of the story, just I'd love to hear a little bit more about that path. How did you get chosen to be the Pope's bodyguard under the Swiss Guard in the first place? What's that process like? I'm just genuinely curious.

Yeah, it's sort of a wild story. I mean, it's a wild story and it's sort of out of the ordinary. Look, the Swiss Guards are the oldest military in the world. We were founded in 1506, but it is, to a Swiss, It's a foreign legion. So when I went into the Swiss Guards, this is really being a mercenary, and you're going into the service of a foreign head of state and actually had a lost Swiss citizen going in there. I had to give that up.

Oh, really?

Became a Vatican citizen. And then, you know. But there's an agreement that if you leave, you go back, you get it back, and you won't be prosecuted for. For serving a foreign.

They have an arrangement.

And so it's a legion, a foreign legion. And therefore you have to apply. They don't come look for you, you go look for them. And I must say, I was a. I don't want to say troubled youth, because that brings up all kinds of issues with drugs and crime and everything, which. It wasn't like that. But I was a confused youth. I just couldn't find my way. My way in life and my way with school and everything. The only thing I was good at was fighting, quite frankly, because I'm. I'm the youngest of six kids and. And learned that well. And so I basically felt that becoming a bodyguard was about the coolest thing you can think of.

Were you like a James Bond fan growing up? Were you like a James Bond?

Oh, of course. Right. I was in the Swiss military. I was there, and I went to sort of the officer school there, and the whole thing was just, you know, the one thing I flourished at. So I applied for this, and lo and behold, they accepted me.

That's fantastic. So, one question I had about that experience, being that the Catholic Church is one of the biggest organizations in the world, what did you learn about leadership at the highest level from the Pope?

As you say, the centrality of the human person, that the Pope is somebody that looks like you're on top of a large organization. I think every. Every other organization is, in a way, similar, but if you don't bring people to a common vision, then that. Then that leadership can't really be effective or flourish. And I think that's something that the Pope, any Pope, any. Any person of a large organization has to work on to actually work with People, and. And in a sense, create a common vision rather than just telling people, okay, this is the way to go, let's go for it. And. And I was impressed with that, you know, because you. You end up sort of being the fly on the wall, being always there, and you. You see how that works.

Tremendous. And going back to your, we'll call it, quote, troubled, troubled youth. I mean, was the Pope a real beacon for morality? How did that help shape you in your younger days and moving into true adulthood?

It wasn't at all. I was a totally secular Catholic growing up, and I did not join the Swiss Guards for religious reasons. He did change my mind, however, and I started to take this much more seriously because of his example and his humanity is what impressed me. And just the authenticity of the man, which is, of course, something. You know, you see this. These people often with public Personas. You see them as the public Persona with the pomp and circumstance, but I see behind and I meet the person, and I have to say I was impressed.

That's fantastic. And from my research, I read that. So after you left the Swiss Garden, correct me if I'm wrong, but you had a newfound passion for your faith, and you began to enter the world of business and entrepreneurship. How did you find. How'd you find that initial group, that transition from service into business?

Actually, by accident. I met my wife in Rome and then came to America. I didn't speak English when I was 23 years old. And I left there and I fell in. I mean, fell in. I met some other guys. I studied in Boston, Massachusetts, and I met some other students, and they said, hey, we know these kids, they're from mit. And they came up with this. With this computer software kind of idea. Remember, this was in the late 80s. And I went. I've never used to. I think I used a computer twice before. But anyway, they were. They loved the fact that I speak like five languages. And they said, listen, you need to come and help us over here. And so I was introduced to this company called FTP Software, which was just a bunch of kids. I think the oldest of them was 20, was 30 years old. And they ported TCPIP to the PC, which is basically to bring the Internet to the PC. At the time, I had no idea what that meant. And I didn't plan this. I basically went in because these were cool kids, and I just love to hang out with them. And it wasn't even a paying job. You know, they're just basically saying, hey, you know, if you hang out with Us here, why don't you talk to these foreigners who keep calling? And so I built up the international presence for the company and eventually, you know, I got a tiny fraction of the company. And how'd that work out? It worked out okay. We went public in 93 and it was a ride. It has a lot to do sort of in putting things together afterwards. See, we went in there with pure passion and interest and as a team, we were actually. We never went into this to say, oh, let's make a lot of money, or. So we went into this because we said the Internet is the ultimate equal access society. Everybody gets an IP address, everybody. This is justice, this is equality. And the profit and everything was a side effect, a positive, required side effect. We used to call it FTP stands for File Transport Protocol, which is today like Kleenex, but we called it actually Fund that Pays, because we just genuinely enjoyed each other's company and loved the work that we were doing.

So two key takeaways that I'm hearing from this, and it kind of resonates now with the phase of technology going into Web3 now, the early days, right? And there's people that are genuinely doing it because the love of technology and all the benefits that Web3 is going to bring, very similar to your story there too, where they're doing it for the love, for the love of the game, as we like to say here. And you were lucky enough to fall into an opportunity and hit your car to the right, hit your horse to the right cart there. What was one of those early lessons learned during your time working with those guys? You know, from a. An early mistake that maybe like, okay, shit like this really resonated. I'm going to carry this lesson throughout the rest of my life.

Two things, really. One is that it's not the best technology that always wins. It's always a combination of technology and access, market access and speed. And we made many mistakes. I mean, I don't want to go into the details. I mean, Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if the judgment was best software, right? There has to be another aspect for it to be there. Operating systems and stuff like this. We did that. And if you become a technology purist, then you pay the price for that, including being pushed out of the market altogether. So speed and practicality are very important in the. In the market in general. The other thing that I learned has to do with this kind of. Now I would call it a profit obsession or a financialization of the market that as soon as we went public and Everything focused on Wall street, things went south. We lost the heart, we lost the soul. And it's very painful to see that. But it was a big lesson and.

Thank you for sharing it. So, shifting gears, or I should say traveling down the road. When did this concept of principled entrepreneurship become, like, centrally important to you? And I'd love if you could break it down, what that means for folks out there who do not know.

So principled entrepreneurship is simply a way of looking at entrepreneurship with some. With some specific pillars underneath. Core thoughts, core ideas. You see, it's. I don't know whether you're aware of Simon Sinek or Sinek or Sinek. I'm not sure what he. How he pronounces his name.

Yeah.

About the why, you see, that sort of is the theme of my life, is what I'm finding out is you have to have a strong why. This is what we had at FTP until we lost the strong why. And by the way, money can't be the strong why because it's can't be the motivator. It's a means to an end. The why has to be an end.

It's interesting.

And basically what I'm doing with principled entrepreneurship is to define these pillars. You could call them principles. I just didn't want to use principles for principal entrepreneurship. But pillars and these five mental models of how to think about business and how to think about the why, that gives some structure of doing business. And it's almost like the compass that keeps you focused in the forest or in the mountains, so to speak.

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So let's talk, let's talk about those five pillars, high level. What are the five pillars? I hope you know this, I hope you memorize it by now.

I've done this for a few tests. It's actually what I teach, right? It's, it's, it's sort of the book talks about what I teach. So the first one is the most important insight in this and that is let's not forget that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy. One of my biggest frustrations or pet peeves, if somebody says it's only business, nothing personal, that's stupid.

It's all personal.

It's all personal. There's only you and me. The companies come and go and so we should never forget this business asks a very simple question. How may I help you? That has two people in it, you and me. That's all there is to this. Now I need to use my talents to add value and so on, and that value is profitability and all that. That's not beside the point. But that's the secondary thing. The first thing of the why is that the economy exists for people and that should sort is a north is a true north, so to speak. And then the second thing is that what we do in the why do we work, we actually don't work to make money. We actually work to reach our excellence. We don't just play sports to win the game. We actually play sports to become the best at what we can do. Right? And I think that's very important. And creativity is so, is something so uniquely human that animals can't create? You know, animals don't come up with penicillin or the Internet or, you know, or a rocket that goes to the moon, but we humans can. And so this creativity is a uniquely human aspect. And I think that's something to understand that first and foremost what we need to do at work is to be creative. And if we're not creative anymore, we're going to lose the soul of it. Which by the way has to do with the current sort of deflation with the great exit Exodus or whatever they call it. And, and the disengagement at work is, is because we stopped understanding what work ought to be all about. So that's the second one. Should I go on or do you have a question?

Please no. These are fantastic. These are core pillars I agree with.

The third one is what I learned the Hard way. Look where we start companies and we took, we focus on strategy and, and products and everything. We totally forget about culture. Yet as the try the old meme goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. I know it's used a lot, but it's not implemented a lot. And so I often forget when I helped start companies to totally forget about the culture and sort of let it happen by itself. But that comes back and bites you afterwards. And so I write about that. And then, and then the other thing is this great misunderstanding about the free market that we have to keep in mind. Principal Auto Horse always try to create Win win solutions. That's the definition of a free market. I'm not, I don't have to be on this podcast and you don't have to invite me and the people who listen to this right now don't have to listen. This is all based on win win. And if you want to add value for somebody, you bet you sure make better. That is worth their effort, right? Or that it creates value for them. It's just important to understand that all around this has to be good for the employees, for the investor, for the customer, for the channel, for everybody involved. Win win solutions. And we often forget this in our culture. We draw business as being these selfish bastards and we call. And this is again one of my pet peeves. We think the economy is a zero sum game. This is this whole idea where people come with, oh, we need to redistribute wealth and this and that. You know what it's like. Wealth is like pizza. Money is like a pizza. And there's some people who think that we need to slice the pizza in 100 pieces because there's 100 people around the table. I have news for you. The economy is a pizza shop. Just make more pizza. And you know how we make pizza? By work, by creating value for others. If you want to solve poverty, bring more people into access to business and.

Networks like that, it's teach someone to fish. I mean, that's the old adage. I mean, you have to create opportunities. You can't just hand people money.

Yeah, it's just, it looks, this sounds like a simple thing, but look, I've been teaching at a business school now for 10 years and for 10 years I'm fighting this and it just won't go away. This idea that, that the economy is a zero sum game. It's one of the biggest misconceptions of our time. And then the last pillar, the fifth pillar is sort of my admonition to everybody to Think like an entrepreneur. Always think like an entrepreneur. There's two kinds of people in the world. There's harvesters and creators. Just make sure you're always a creator first, because if you move into the harvesting mode, this is when you're getting some of these very bad side effects and very bad outcomes. Just humans are creators. Stay a creator.

Yeah, and thank you so much for breaking those down. They're critically important and, you know, a couple of key takeaways there. You speak about win win. How, How. How do you advise folks to seek out win win relationships? Are there, Are there green flags, red flags?

Well, if you don't know, why. So it's the value proposition to the customer. And if you're, if you're BSing about your value proposition, that's certainly not a good way to start. I, you know, and I run an entrepreneurship center, so I have a lot of people come to me with business ideas, and we do a lot of startup stuff. And it's the. Win win goes out the window as soon as you start with the product first and then with the customer, you create a solution that's looking for a problem. And I think that's one of the key issues in the startup world. In the established business world, it's this harvester mentality where you're cutting every corner to get every last penny out of something. And that's in a sense to say, well, let's not leave anything on the table. I actually want to leave something on the table because I want to. My goal is actually enduring value, not sucking every dollar out of every deal.

That I have that month, especially in the beginning.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

That, that's tremendous. And I want to talk about, you know, the experiences that led to you founding the Seven group. And, yeah, you talked about poverty in one of those pieces, too. What's the unique approach here?

So the unique approach is that there's only, you know, we are facing the first time in the human history, the opportunity to eliminate abject poverty. But if you're listening to the news and to what the mainstream of our culture is talking about, you think we're all starving to death and there's more poor people today, abjectly poor people, than before. Just Covid is a bump in the road on this. But let's say in 1855 or 1890 or something like that, 95% of people alive on earth lived in abject poverty. That's like what the UN calls below two bucks a day or something. In that range, people don't Believe this because it's never being said out loud. Today we're down to 10%. This actually dipped below 10% just before COVID and Covid is. And now the war in the Ukraine and everything, we can deal with that, but that's a temporary issue. We are actually eliminating abject poverty so that people would not have to die of hunger and basic disease and stuff like this. That is the first time ever. And I tell you what did that. This was not a government intervention. This was not a top down solution on something. This is capitalism and the free market that created this, this opportunity to eliminate poverty. And once I started to realize that, and especially entrepreneurship is a huge part of this, I just went on that bandwagon and I sort of made this one of the missions in my life to teach how business and entrepreneurship is the solution to poverty. Not NGOs in the government.

It's enabling folks to create wealth, create success, create business, have those platforms and give them the seeds and the tools so they could build it. And I've heard you describe your God. I'm sorry. Sure.

It's also this aspect and I'm trying not to use the strong language that it makes me usually say because it's this aspect of that. We almost look at the poor as if it was a petting zoo or something. When we go in and pat them on the head and you poor little thing. And all of our interventions with the poor always has this, it seems to me, gives me this feeling like as if the poor were stupid, that they can't cut it, that we have to take care of them because they can't take care of themselves. Well, I've traveled all over the world in emerging markets, in post conflict societies. I haven't met the stupid poor. I don't know where they would be. Even here in the US I don't see anybody who's stupid. I'm seeing people who don't have access to networks of productivity and exchange. That's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing people who have been infantilized and people tell them what to do all day long. But I don't, I think these, these programs that supposedly eradicate poverty from the top down are an affront to the dignity of a poor person.

And just on a, on a related note to that one and one of my observations over the last few years is the. And related is the rise of the gig, the global gig economy.

Yeah.

Me personally, I have a team of freelancers that are all around the world.

Yeah.

That work in you know, and some of them are in impoverished countries and they do fantastic work hard, really creative, smart work, and I'm paying them more than a fair wage of what they're making in their country. And that's the way you empower them. And that's what's so beautiful about this entire relationship. So I've heard you describe your God given talent as building startups, but also you have this divine passion for teaching and interacting with students. What do you think makes you so good at both in that balance?

You know, nobody ever asked me that, and so I haven't really reflected on that. I do think we try to do here. Yeah. Thank you, Adam. It's very, very cool. I think there's two sides to it. On the one side, I think I have a strong sense of empathy. I think that's what helped me market and bring these products to market in my business career, that I have an empathy where I can interact with people and sort of understand what the need is and speak in a way that they understand. I can explain technology in a way that makes sense to the consumer and why they would need it. I think that's what I'm doing today, just not with a product, but with these ideas about the free market and entrepreneurship. And I think that's a key ingredient. And then also, I teach in a different way. I'm a classic entrepreneur. I have ADHD and dyslexia, and so I teach for my crowd. I always say I teach the back row at school because I used to sit in the back row, you know, and I understand how it is, and I understand how it is not to measure up to the world standard of how to memorize things and how to remember things. Exactly. And I teach to that. And so I guess I stick out in that sense.

And that's your superpower. So let's talk about the book for a moment here. And the central issue is how 67% of US employees have mentally checked out at work. And in it, you describe this as a management rather than employee issue. And for anyone out there who's doing buzzword bingo, we call this quiet quitting. I'd love if you could elaborate. I mean, I'm a recruiter by trade, I'm a podcast host by passion, I'm a recruiter by trade. So this is something that really sits close with me. And, you know, my take is disengagement. And my take is also around people having passions outside of work and getting back to the, you know, moving away from this old school working mentality into Our work should have a purpose and we should feel good about what we do every day. I love your thoughts on this.

I mean, what you're saying, and you may be a stronger expert at this than I am because you're dealing with the people who are on the move, so to speak. But what I'm seeing is what we let go of is the actual meaning of work itself. Think about the two dominant paradigms today. You have the Friedman crowd who says the only objective of a business is to. Is to create a profit, which is not exactly what Friedman said. I understand that, but that's what stuck. And then the other side, sort of the CSR crowd who says you have to give back. Right. What I notice is that both of these actually don't talk about work itself. They talk about the outcome of work. They actually both talk about profit. And so. But if I'm asking you to do something all day and the only thing I care about is the outcome of that, then that doesn't really leave that. That makes you feel like you're a means to an end. You feel used. This is this whole feeling of commodity.

A cog in the wheel.

Yeah, exactly. I would like to focus and work with companies to say, look, we need to. Need to come up with an explanation that the work that we do itself matters. That work itself is the thing that I actually look forward to. This is my experience in the startups. I think this is what you feel as well. If you have a startup where I'm actually. The work itself is what's fulfilling to me. I have a why in this work and I have people work with me and we can see how we all flourish with our talents. And I'm telling you, the experience of being on a team like this, where the, the sum is more than the, than the parts of it, it's like flying, man. It's like. It's an experience I wish on everybody. But if you go into one of these numb offices or office spaces where you're just really basically being treated as a cog, I don't blame anybody for checking out, because that's just the normal human thing to do.

Yeah, disengagement. And it's always interesting too, because if you see it all over LinkedIn and other parts of social media, you know, blaming management, but management are people too. Like these are folks themselves who are disengaged. So where does the buck stop? I mean, it has to rise to the top and central leadership.

I do a bit of both in my work, so I work with students and people out there who work for companies and in companies to help them find a deeper meaning in their work. And so sort of to say, focus on your talents and looking at how you can develop with your talents and with the work and find meaning through that to sort of find your excellence and then grow in that excellence. And you can actually do this in pretty much any environment. But I also work with teams, with leadership and say, look, you have to change your language, change your approach to your employees instead of these silly employee, what do they call them? Performance reviews? I mean, come on, that's like an extension of school with a grade report or something. That certainly doesn't encourage creativity. I'm saying the way I do it. Flourishing. Let's work with people about their life plans to say, how is your life going? How are you flourishing? How can I make you better at what you need to do and invest in and look at the people's strengths and talents and invest in those. We need to make sure that our employees see us as having their back and being at their side rather than being in front of them. Again, it gives this zero sum impression. When you manage by, by fear and rules, then you're creating a fight or flight culture all the time in your company. And that, that is a part of what takes the toll on engagement.

Tremendous. And another overlap I notice is that you believe our employees are only sustained. Are the only sustainable competitive advantage in a company. And I couldn't agree more.

Right.

Like what makes you different? And people say the people. Okay, well let's, let's dig into that.

Yeah, we invest in all kinds. Look, I mean, I've done it myself. It's not, I'm not accusing. If you're listening to this and you feel I'm accusing you. I'm not accuse myself. I've done it myself. Okay. I'm just telling what I learned. We all have. We've invested into all this technology and we think there's ROI and everything. And yet the only investment with infinite ROI is the human person. How much have you invested in your people? And I'm not saying, oh, I train my people in this and that. No, I'm saying how much have you invested in your people to make them flourishing and happy employees and bring the team together in an effective way? That's not saying singing, you know, standing in a circle and singing Kumbaya. I'm saying to actually make them better at what they're doing and happier in what they're doing. That's an investment has infinite return.

I love it. And I couldn't agree more. So let's bring it home here. What is important to you? When I say the word legacy, and I'm talking about your personal legacy, how do you define it? What are your thoughts around legacy when you leave this planet, how do you want people to talk about you and what do you want them to say about you?

Look, nobody does business alone and nobody does life alone. We're one big team here. And the greatest motivation you can have and the greatest joy that you can have is to work with a team and in a sense, help others. I want my legacy to be that I helped a lot of people grow and become better at who they are, to find themselves and live out who they are more strongly, which of course then helps you do this yourself. And so my North Star is this belief in human excellence and human flourishing. I do not think that humanity is a curse on the world. I actually think that we are actually a part of the solution, not the problem.

I love it. Tremendous. And even still, my last question. So this is my masterclass. This show for me is my masterclass. 235 + episodes of interviewing experts like yourself from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different perspectives, and I love to share that with my audience. I'll ask you this. What is the single greatest piece of advice that you've ever received, Andreas, that you take action on every day of your life?

Your life is about getting, getting somewhere together. So the biggest, best advice I've ever received is try to focus on what we have in common when you're working with people and in the world in general, rather than what separates us. I think right now, especially in our world, we're increasingly focusing on what is separating us. Yet we're only going to win this together. This, of course, applies in your family, on your team, and in your city and in the world. We need to find things that unite us. And one of the great. The person who told me this is actually the person who I wrote this book about the art of principled entrepreneurship, the art meaning artsyoka. And he says, let's talk about the American dream, which, for example, in the United States is the great unifier. It's one of the highest resonating concepts across every, every division you could think of. And let's focus on that and work on what unites us rather than what divides us. Because as. As humanity as a society, you know, divided we fall and united we stand.

Tremendous. Andreas, I want to thank you so much for joining me, for spending time with me and my audience today and sharing your wisdom. I want everybody to check out andreas.widmer. i mean, I'm sorry, andreas-widmer.com I will link it up there too. Links to his book there. Andreas, where else can folks connect with you? Where could they learn more?

I'm easy, I'm easy to find at my university's website, cua Edu and, and the book is, and I have, you know, social media, Facebook, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. And I look forward to hearing from everybody.

Excellent. I'll link them all up in their show notes. Again, thank you so much for joining us today and everyone listening at home. This has been a fantastic multifaceted conversation. So many golden takeaways. And definitely check out Andres Journey man. I mean, like just the early days in the Swiss garden, the lessons learned from the pope. I mean, you've been there, done that, seen that. Check it out. Remember, for more, check out thepodscast.com Follow us on all the social media channels. Remember, take care of each other, look out for one another. And catch us next week for another great episode of the podcast. Take care everybody.

Wisdom is forever. But for us, it's time to go. Thank you for joining us. Luckily, we'll be back with our next episode soon. Jam packed with more incredible humans. Thank you for listening, subscribing and sharing. To join the conversation, search the pause cast on LinkedIn. And to catch up on past episodes and more info, Please visit www.thepausecast.com.