Ep. 24: Andreas Widmer: Principled Entrepreneurship: Why Business is Always Personal

This is Michael Matheson Miller, and you are listening to the Moral Imagination Podcast. Welcome again to the Moral Imagination Podcast. Thank you for listening. My guest today is Andreas Widmer. Andreas is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and the director of the R. Carley Sioka Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America's Bush School of Business. I've known Andreas for quite a long time. He's a good friend, so I'm really thankful to have him on the show. Andreas, previously, before working at Catholic University's business school, he co-founded the Seven Fund, which is a philanthropic organization promoting enterprise solutions to poverty. He is a seasoned business executive. He's done a lot of different things, especially in the high-tech realm, international business strategy consulting, economic development. He was the CEO of the business strategy firm OTF Group, which was formerly part of the Monitor Group. And, he helped lead web content management pioneer ePrize Corporation, the speech recognition pioneer Dragon Systems, and the internet pioneer FTP Software. So, he was early on in some of the tech industry. He has worked in the United States, in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America. And, through his work in his companies, he's been involved in bringing more than 100 leading-edge technology products to market and was also an executive in residence at Highland Capital. partners. He's a writer. He's the author of the book The Pope and the CEO: Pope Saint John Paul's Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard. And he's working on a new book that we're going to talk about today on principled entrepreneurship. So, Andreas, thank you very much for joining the Moral Imagination Podcast.

My pleasure and my honor. Thank you for having me, Michael.

Very good to have you. Thanks a lot. So we're going to talk about the new book you're working on, Principled Entrepreneurship, and 5 ideas that you say are part of what makes a principled entrepreneur And so we'll talk about that. But why don't, before we go into that, you have a great story. You were a Swiss Guard, you worked for John Paul II, and this kind of started you on a journey. Why don't you tell, I mean, you write about it in The Pope and the CEO, and I'll put links to all that on the Moral Imagination website. But why don't you just start, Andreas, by telling us a little bit about your story and how you kind of got from a man up in the mountains of Switzerland to a— Which is true, right? To a Swiss Guard, to some highfalutin, fancy-pants CEO, and now just a professor of entrepreneurship and all this stuff.

It sounds better than it is, but I really do come from a very small village in Switzerland. The honor of my life was to be chosen to be one of the Swiss Guards. Many people don't know that most Swiss Guards don't go because of their faith to the Swiss Guards, but because it's being a bodyguard, so it's really cool. And, you know, 20 years old, you think that's about the coolest thing you can do. I did. And I went there, and through John Paul's example and interference, if you wish, the Catholic faith became mine. I mean, I was Catholic, cradle Catholic and everything, but I grew up through the '70s and wasn't really either— I'm starting to be more careful now that I teach. I can't say I wasn't properly catechized because it could very well be that I didn't pay proper attention. So, So, one or the other. In any case, I found the Catholic faith through, in large part, through John Paul II. And my experience there, though for about 2 years, changed my life forever. The first thing I did is start to realize that I lacked a certain level of education, I guess I would say, and I came to America to study, and I studied international business up in Andover, Massachusetts, and then through that came in touch with a couple of— well, a group of young entrepreneurs, engineers from MIT who had this idea of bringing this strange networking protocol for supercomputers to the PC. And they said, well, we have so many people from abroad who call us and want to talk with us and we can't understand them and, you know, just make them go away. And so I started there pretty much as handling all of their international inquiries and everything and eventually became the vice president of their international division. So, and then from there on sort of slid into this career in high tech because I was in Boston and all these high tech firms were around there. And it's sort of, for a while there, it sort of started to— I sort of lost my vision a bit in that, not that I stopped believing or so, but my faith was somewhat reduced to Sunday. And then the rest of it was taken, you know, Monday through Saturday was totally taken up with just managing these startup companies and hypergrowth. And you can imagine how this all went. It took a while for me to find my footing and to start to realize, to put that intentionality, that purpose, and that change and awareness back into my actions as it pertained to business.

Okay, well, good. Well, thanks. So you now, after— I mean, I did a little bit in your bio of all the things you did. You worked for a lot of different high-tech firms, and then you were with On the Frontier Consulting, and then we met. That's when we met. you were working with Mike Fairbanks and doing some projects for Pioneers of Prosperity in Rwanda with the Legatum Institute. And then you and I met then in Rwanda, I think. Well, maybe we met in the United States, but then the first time we really started to kind of talk was in Rwanda and have worked on things ever since. So it's great. You're part of Poverty Inc. and a number of things. So you're now working on this book. Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. That's the working title, or is that the final title?

Working title, but I'd like it to be the final title. But we'll see.

All right. And so let's maybe go into that. You spent a lot of time— you teach now business entrepreneurship at Catholic University's business school. And this is something you've developed over time. And it really is part of, I think, if I'm understanding this integration of this kind of life that you've talked about, we've just gone through a short element of it, but a lot of different experience. You're trying to distill some of the things you learned both in your own life and also just from watching entrepreneurs. Why don't you give us a brief overview of that, and then we'll go into the 5 things that you think signify or are characteristics of entrepreneurship?

I find a couple of things on what I learned about teaching business and getting into education and so on. The first thing is that I'm sort of shocked. But not surprised that business is the only thing that we teach where the person who teaches it has never done it. So that, would you ever have— would you want your surgeon to be trained by somebody who's never had a scalpel or used a scalpel in a surgery? Well, in business we do this all the time. We talk to people who have no idea of the actual situation, of actually doing this. I'm always super surprised by this. And one of the things this leads to is this super— what's the word for this— a super academicization of business. That business is starting to behave as if it was a science, as if it was a— I sort of, in a belittling way, I don't mean it to be belittling, but But I mean, to sort of visualize it, it's almost like a color-by-numbers thing. And the whole idea with the Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, look, business is more art than it is science. Business is something that is a lot of the actions, of course you need to know accounting, and of course marketing has reason behind it and theory behind it and all of that. But all of that should be, in a sense, That comes afterwards. Let me first teach you why we're doing this, and for you to get a pattern recognition and a deep understanding of what it means that you're doing, so that then when I give you all these tools, you can actually use them properly. Because a lot of the tools in business can do a lot of good, and they can do a lot of harm. A little bit like a scalpel, right? Mm-hmm. And so my first focus and, and primary focus as I go into a business school and I say, I look around and say, okay, what should I teach, is to focus on the intention of the character of the person and of the motivation. When I started to teach somebody, one of the professors who was older than me, and it actually came from his dad who spent a whole career in higher education, when I said, well, how do you define this class and what do you do exactly? And he said, look, you can do 3— if you do a good class, there's 3 things you can teach. You can teach knowledge, skill, or character, attitude, basically. And the thing is, the knowledge becomes secondary because, you know, with the internet today, you can find knowledge anywhere you want. The skill is something that comes along with practice, and you just have to do a lot of it. And then the character is the one thing that is constant. And so we do best through an education, especially at this level, high school, college, and maybe business graduate school, to focus on people's character. And that sort of gave me this idea of saying, okay, in entrepreneurship, lots of people say, look, here are the 3 things to do for an entrepreneur. Here's the 1, 2, 3 step. Here's the color-by-numbers, kind of approach to this, and I'm saying, no, no, no, this is all wrong. You know what? If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to figure that out. The part that I need to help you figure out is to find your values and find your intention and find the why of why you're doing this. The what is going to be the easy part. And so, this book is all about the why and the intention behind it all.

Okay. Yeah, interesting. So, I think maybe is this a summary that, in one sense, that Business and working have— there's working in a business has certain technical elements, but too often we have almost a scientistic approach where you just learn the technique. It's kind of a technocratic solution. So just like I can plug in something into my computer and have it play, I can just plug in these elements. But that ultimately, to think about what a business is and what an entrepreneur is, we're now back to this question of what does it mean to be a human person? What does it mean to be a human person in society? And then what is a business? And you mentioned John Paul II, and I think— I mean, you and I have talked about this before over the years, but John Paul, I think, has one of my favorite definitions for a business. And I probably talked about this on this podcast before, but it's kind of surprising because you'd think Peter Drucker or somebody, and I think he has a pretty good one too. But John Paul says something to the effect of, that a business is a community of persons who get together to meet their own needs, right, by creating goods and services that other people are willing to pay for, they value. And so there's this dual, in a sense, communal relationship right there in the beginning. And, and I think what I think is kind of interesting about that, too, is that for John Paul is, you know, I used to teach philosophy of love and sexuality. And we'd read all these different Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas and Dietrich von Hildebrand. But I would go through, I would say, okay, what do you think? To the students, we'd read Wojtyła's Love and Responsibility. I'd say, okay, what do you think is the beginning of love? And then people would say, like, trust, hope, all these things. Like, well, now the Pope thinks it's attraction. Right. Wow. Attraction. And so it kind of surprised them that the Pope would say attraction. And I think that comes to the site of what it means to be embodied. Well, the same thing with business. What's business? It's a community of persons where people get together to meet their own needs. So right in the beginning, it's actually directed to yourself. I need to make money to feed my family.

It's not from the benevolence of the butcher.

Yeah. So there's a Smith overlap. But then right away, it's in serving the needs of others. And so it's in this social relationship And then he says, okay, how do you think about profit? Well, profit's a good thing, but it's telling you whether you're actually meeting the needs of others. And I think there he overlaps with Drucker, who says the purpose is to create a customer. And he doesn't mean in a simply utilitarian manner, but that you are actually providing for others. So maybe I know that's part of it, but how— you've talked about this attitude or character. And maybe I've stolen some of your thunder by using John Paul, but what do you think is the— before we get to the— maybe this is the first principle, actually, but what is the core beginning understanding of what business is, what an entrepreneur is, that you try to get across to people that changed the way you think, but you think has potential to change others?

So the first principle is the most important principle, and that is that Business exists for us, not us for business. The economy exists for us, not us for the economy. It seems so simple, but I'm telling you, it's so easy to forget that, that the centrality of the human person to what we're doing here is paramount. Now, that doesn't mean I'm excluding the need for profit and competitiveness and excellence and all of that. I just, as the foundation, let's remember we're doing all this because of the human person. Then—

Okay, so why don't you pause for a second? Let me just push to make you explain it. Business is not for us, but we're not for— what does that mean? It's a little bit— it could be seen as a cliché, so explain what you mean.

Right now, there is a danger for us to really financialize the entire economy, to say that this is all about financial growth, about trading, about money at the end, or efficiency. These are all some of the wheels and some of the things inside this machine, but the output of this— what is the end, the mean, the end of the economy, the end of business, the end of human work? Is human excellence. If we miss that, then we're going to miss the path. And if this is just a race, you know, and believe it, this is one of the reasons why I'm bringing this from the heart, is I have lived in the high-tech world and in high business as a CEO. I've been in these circles for 30 years. Okay, I know what I'm talking about. That when we say the cliché is whoever, you know, has the most toys wins, Yes, that is not just a cliché. There's an entire swath of our economy who lives by that. And so we need to refind the center of saying, why are we doing this? We've lost the forest for the trees, if you wish.

Okay, so let's— you say in your first principle, so I'll read it here, and I can put these on the website as well, at The Moral Imagination, on your interview. But number 1, business should exist for people, not the other way around. People do not exist for the sake of business and its success. And when you put people first, profits will follow. So you've talked a little bit about exist for people. I mean, I think it seems that one of the things you're doing here is that it's a critique of, of a pure utilitarianism, right? People are not simply— and this goes back to Wojtyła. We talk about this issue with Oyebanjo Akocha, with Chris Arnotti, the idea that human beings are not simply objects to be manipulated or simply objects in the— or cogs in the business machine for profits. So that first— so profit's important, but you say profits will follow. Maybe why don't you develop, like, what's a— so if I'm going to go into a business, if I'm starting a business and you say if you were giving me advice on— I'm like, well, I think this is what I want to do. What would you say to me First of all, about this principle, but also how should I create my—

I'll give you a quick story, 2 comparative stories.

Okay.

So one is, you know, there's hundreds of entrepreneurs coming to me all the time because I run an entrepreneurship center here and there's hundreds of these entrepreneurs, great people with great potential and great ideas come to me and say, what do you think, right? And so there's one, this one kid comes to me and he's like beautiful, I love him, but So he comes to me and he says, hey, I invented this powder. And we're sitting there at the coffee shop at CY and he has it in a vial and then he says, okay, but— and I said, okay, what is it? And he said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So get a glass of water. I get a glass of water and he has this vial in his hand. It's like an aluminum chemical vial. It's almost like what a cigar fits into. And so then he goes, okay, hold the thing with the powder. And he takes the thing off And he pours water into it. And within a nanosecond, the thing was so cold I couldn't believe it. Almost my feet— my fingers almost stuck to it. I'm saying, wow, this is amazing. And he says, yeah, this is totally amazing. I invented that. And I said, that's really cool. What is it? What is it for? And he said, I don't know, it's really cool, isn't it? He invented something for the invention's sake. Like, this is what I'm asking students not to do, to create a solution in search for a problem. There's not a person-centered approach to innovation. I'll give you the other side. I'm actually writing this book with the guy, using as my guideline or light a guy called Art Siocca, who happens— he's an old friend of mine, and he was one of the most influential people in the wine industry over the last 30, 40 years. And Art is American-Italian. He grew up outside of New York City, and his grandpa, you know, like any immigrant Italian, his nonno would make wine and would, with his grandson of 7 or 8 years, would invite him and they would make wine together in the backyard. And then, you know, Art sort of grew up seeing this and he saw how this wine became their table wine and that there wouldn't be a dinner or a lunch without table wine. Like, you know, they brought this from Italy. Like in Italy, you couldn't think of having a meal without wine. And he realized that there's no table wine in the United States, but there's all these Italian Americans, and this is like a whole culture and all of that. And so when Art later on had an opportunity to get involved in the wine industry, his vision was always to say, you know what, let me feel— let me make the table wine for people like my grandpa. Because one of the things, a side thing, is that You know, after 2 months, Grandpa's wine didn't hold up so well. Like, you know, he didn't notice it because he drank a glass or 2 every day. But when Art would visit, he's like, dude, this wine is not at peak performance here. And so Art actually brought table wine to America. Do you see how these are 2 fundamentally different ways to find to create a company, to create a solution for somebody. That also is person-centeredness, that we start off with the consumer of saying, you know, I love this, the most fundamental sentence in business is, how may I help you? I and you. And what this means is that I'm trying to solve your problem with my expertise or my doing or my product or my innovation, I'm trying to solve your problem with my excellence. And if we apply this to the whole company, then we're using— we're creating value. We add value to you as a customer through our excellence. And now you have the 2-person center. You have both the consumer and the worker in the center of the concern of the company. And that is when we create value and when profit will follow as a side effect. But the core concern here is excellence on both sides. And I would like to add to this that in this book, I'm actually not making a Christian or a Catholic case for this. I'm actually making a business case for this and a human case for it. So I'm not going to lead— in this book, I'm not leading with theology per se.

Okay. Yeah. So in a sense, like this, it's a There's, in one sense, there's the sake of invention just to invent something, and that's good. But when we, when we want to think about business, that a business is ultimately, or first, a solution to a problem, somebody's problem. I mean, I think, you know, Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One, he has a section right in the beginning. I don't know if you read it. He says something to the effect, like, which I like. He's like, you know, what you need to do to be an entrepreneur is to solve problems, to be a problem solver. And so, and sometimes that's a nonprofit and a charity, but, but more often than not, that's a company, right? That solves, that solves problems. And I think the— and then the profit follows element— sorry, it solves a problem. And then the profit follows element is that if you are solving a problem that people need to be solved and that they're willing to pay for it, then, then you're going to get the profits. And so it's going to follow. Now, of course, We can talk about this later, but I think at least for a quick caveat, that doesn't mean that every profitable business is doing something good. You can make a profit doing evil things too.

Well, that's the thing. If you don't do it this way, then you have to do it another way, which usually ends up being bad ways that actually give the market economy a bad name. Because if you're not really adding value in a free market where the buyer and the seller are free to choose and all that, If you're not doing it this way, what I just described, then eventually you're going to have to force somebody or acquire an advantage over your competitors with less than, let's say, ideal means. And so that distorts the market, and then that has all kinds of effects, which again, in the end effect, hurts the person-centeredness. And that's how financialization and all kinds of Government influence, cronyism, all this kind of stuff comes into this interplay between customer and vendor.

Okay, so what about this? I think someone could push back, and I think maybe this actually leads into your second principle. Your second principle is entrepreneurs should create goods that are truly good and services that truly serve, and that everything that the business owner does should support and reward that approach. But I think a lot of people would say, and with justification, I should say, with justification, they would say, look, I mean, like right now you're talking about the government or messed up cronyism. But I mean, what if we just like look at business? I mean, this seems to be what you're trying to address is that there's flaws in sometimes in the way we do business where we adopt a utilitarian approach or we produce goods and services that you say are not truly good. So why don't you talk a little bit about that before we think about, say, critiquing a larger system? What do you think some of the errors— what are some of the errors that entrepreneurs and business people make? And then how does the principle of entrepreneurship try to avoid those or correct those?

So the first is with this human-centeredness to say, start with a customer. How may I help you? And then make sure that the I in the how may I help you consists of human excellence, meaning that you create, you know, you pursue your excellence in providing that for this other. That's the first thing. The second thing, the second reflection on this is the second principle about the goods that are truly good and services that truly serve is the first recognition. I just would like to pause and make sure everybody understands that Making work utilitarian is a bit of a strange thing to do because work is really not primarily physical. And in the book, I tell this story how I, you know, when I worked in Rwanda actually with— I don't know, no, we didn't go on the Rwanda trek, on the gorilla trek together, but we helped, you know, with the tourist sector and all that with these, with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. And I, you know— I went on this— long story short, I went on this trek with all these Rwandans. And it doesn't show here, but I'm 6'9, 280 pounds. And I went up to go see wild gorillas with 10 Rwandans who were probably 5'5 and less than half my weight. And so finally, when we find the gorillas, The chief gorilla felt threatened that I would, you know, I don't know, interfere with him and his females or something. Anyway, he charged me and I started to try to run down the mountain, but eventually they made me go to the floor and like go down. And it's very counterintuitive. Like, I felt like running, right?

Submit.

Yeah. Yeah, but I didn't get on.

I've been on safari and there's One of the rules is never run. Do you know why? I read several books on safari. And do you know what the rule for why you never run?

Well, the prey runs.

You know why? Yeah, because food runs.

Yeah.

You don't want to be food. Okay, so go ahead.

Go ahead. Do you know how big a silverback gorilla is? I don't want to make light of this. You would have run. Everybody would run. Anyway, they made me go down, all the way to the floor, and they calmed the guy down. And he was so close to me that I could breathe him, I could smell his breath. He was getting that close, way too close for comfort. Anyway, at the end—

And they're so super strong, I mean, rip you apart.

Oh, he could do anything with me. So at the end, when the danger was over, on the way down, he says, you know, you just basically met the animal that is the closest to you in DNA, 99.99% your DNA. I just watched this guy. All he does is sit on the mountain, eat like wild celery, and, and having it, you know, defend his territory and, and his family, his tribe. Um, and, and here I am, and I'm, I'm in Rwanda on work. He's not going anywhere for work. Like, he cannot— as a matter of fact, he cannot work. I work for a living. So the fact that he cannot work, and we are 99.99%— if you take him apart and me apart and put, you know, do like one of these, uh, deconstruction things and put all the parts together, like, there will be more hair with him, but we are essentially the same, exactly the same biologically. Yet the majority of what we do is completely different. What I mean to say with this is that Work has to be something beyond biology, otherwise he would do it. So, I'm saying that work has to do with the difference between him and me, and that has to do with actually my consciousness and spirituality. And that's why—

What it means to be a human person.

It moves the reason for work and it moves work into that sphere, otherwise he would do it. Yeah, and so let's remember, so when I work, I can actually— I actually grow as a human being. It's actually integral to my development to work, to become more excellent. I can actually become more when I make. I just— I don't just make more, but I become more of me when I do this. He can't— the animal can't do that. They can't grow at being themselves. And so there's a fundamental difference in this. And therefore we have to look at work in the first, you know, and you ask, why can you do this and he can't? Because I am made in the image of the Creator. That is actually the key difference between me and this gorilla is that I'm made in the image of the Creator and he's not. But not in the physical image of the creator. It's more in the creation that I am a creator. Like, I can create in the gorilla camp. And so I believe that that's the most distinguished mark of work, is that we can actually create. You know, when we create software or these programs or something, or even a book, in a sense, you make it out of nothing. You make it out of nothing. You can actually translate your ideas into realities, which is actually entrepreneurship to a large extent. That creativity is the core of work. So my— the principle here is that work has to be creative. If all we do is rearrange the decks on the Titanic, this is not work. That's Sisyphus stuff. It's beyond— it is below us. Like work needs to be creative, that we create something, even if it is creating order. Like maybe if you read what I mean with recreating the desk, the chairs of the Titanic is like a Sisyphus work. But if you would go and clean something and create order, that's creating, right? Because you have a subjective meaning of work rather than only the objective meaning. And that's all, that is always creating because we do it in the image of who we are, right? which is the creator. Now if you turn around and you say, let me now work as a team and have a company, as an entrepreneur I start a company, I start to invite people to join me. And first of all, what I do is I'm not forcing anybody. Nobody works for anybody else. People only work with each other. So first of all, you're not forcing anybody. And second of all, if you truly recognize them as unique people themselves, as persons with dignity, persons who should be recognized in their human dignity, which means that the only proper approach to them is to love them, is you wouldn't wish anything bad for them. So why, if you wouldn't wish anything bad for them, why would you do— make them work that, uh, make them do work that either is bad for them Or you make them make a product that's bad for the customer. It's just, it wouldn't, it's not logical. So what we need in work is an environment of support where we, work itself has to be a support work of human excellence. Yeah, I think it's interesting because— Hold on one second. Yeah, go ahead. The first objective of work is this creativity. The second objective of work is the supportiveness of each other for each other's excellence. And then the third objective of work is, if we, again, if we take the analogy to the Creator, even go beyond the analogy of the Creator, God has never created anything that isn't profitable. There's not a tree that doesn't have seeds. There's nothing on this earth that doesn't superproduce abundance. This is a whole world of abundance. And so our model for creativity is abundance. Therefore, if you create well, there should be abundance. Otherwise, maybe you're not creating. So that's sort of one of my— one of the critical points is that I actually believe that the reward, the abundance, is a condition of work. To me, this is a condition unless you do charity where you're basically distributing stuff. Everything else, there's a condition to reward. Now, reward can be more than physical or more than than financial. There's emotional support. There is creating more value than there was before. And to somehow distribute this among the constituents as a reward is what I mean is conditional to do work and to do business. Otherwise, we're doing something wrong. So just— so the second principle says that to work is to create, to support, and reward. These 3 things need to happen all for work to be good. And if we are entrepreneurs and we create companies that work, we need to keep that in mind.

Okay, so let me try to summarize here. So first of all, I mean, one thing seems to be at the center of your thinking is what it means to be a human person. The goal is to see this person as a partner in an incremental learning process of creating something that provides value for others, right? I mean, there's a lot of kind of shorthand in there. But, but I think that seems to be okay. So, so that's your first idea, that, that at the center is the person, that we are— but worker is part of our nature, part of our essential structure as a worker. And that includes creation. And then, but, but because we're social beings, we don't simply work alone. We work with others and that we want to create an environment where we respect one another and flourish better and push one another on, encourage one another. And then this creates— and your model for this is that we want to think of the entrepreneurial venture as serving the customer, right? And then we support one another, and then we reward one another. So that's create, support, reward. And this— so this reward means— and let me be clear. So this reward is then partially, mostly financial, but also just in a sense that you gain the value of this. Explain to me how you made this point right at the end. If you don't have reward, then you're not doing business. You're doing something else. Can you develop that a little bit? So first of all, did I understand you? I mean, I tried to summarize you there, but did I understand you?

There's one aspect which I'd like to double-click on with the support, and it has to do— it will come out in the next principle of entrepreneurship. But that support means that we pursue everybody else's excellence. And when I mean that somebody doesn't work for me, we only work with each other. What we do, which is a very difficult thing to do as an entrepreneur, but it's very difficult as any team leader. If you're listening to this and you lead 3 people in your team or 5 people on your team, what I'm asking of you to do is to look around the room and say, what is everybody's strength here? Their natural strength, their talents, their gifts. And then make the team so that you allow everybody to focus and basically to put that at the center of their job, so they become more excellent at who they already are, and then create the job for them so that this plays to their strength. How often do you, however, look around the room and say, you know what, they're doing this, but they really are not so good at this, but here they are, and we're just going to try to put a square peg into a round hole. That is not supporting each other in excellence. We even need the honesty to say, you know, this isn't working. Like, you must feel miserable here doing this. Like, we need to find places for each other that we complement each other in our pursuit to excellence, that if we all pursue this excellence, the team is well-rounded all around. I'll give you a quick example. I suck at finance. Like, don't let me do the accounting for this company, okay? Because I'm not— I'm a big picture guy. I'm— once it goes into small numbers and small, you know, that's just— I have ADHD and this is just not my strength. First thing I always do when I start something is to get somebody who's a nitpicker next to me because If this is what they love and they strive on, then I need them to have my back. I'll have their back in the big vision, and they'll have my back in the details. You see how this works? Now we need to create entire companies like this, and we need to create a whole system that supports this. That's what I mean with support. Now, on the reward stuff—

Okay.

It's— I, I don't want to go into a rabbit hole. It's just I feel that what we have created because of a misunderstanding of the free market and what a company really does, we've created all these, quote, nonprofit corporations, these NGOs, which is basically lending out halos to other forms of corporations for them to be inefficient in their own way because apparently greed, you know, it drives normal business and it's an evil thing to do. And so I just have a fundamental suspicion of nonprofits if they're not charities, because I feel that this is just— on the one hand, it's a halo effect that must be good because it's a nonprofit, which is not true. And on the other hand, it's usually a recipe to waste resources.

Okay. Yeah, I think that probably would take us too far off. I mean, you know, in the film Poverty, Inc., and then the Poverty Cure Project, We deal with the problem of NGOs, right? That, you know, there are certain reasons to have NGOs, but often I think they can—

They can have category— I'm not saying the whole category is bad.

Yeah, of course. So, so, but I think let's, let's avoid that. Maybe that's another podcast we can talk about that. And, you know, like I said, we addressed that in the film Poverty, Inc. and in other places. But I think what, if I'm understanding you, what you're trying to say is that there's, and I've talked to other entrepreneurs, business leaders, there's almost a reticence to talk about profit as something valuable. So either it becomes the be-all and end-all of everything, and that's like, you know, so I think, which is like the Milton Friedman error, right? I mean, and this is, it's a little bit more complex than what Friedman said, but generally speaking. They understand the social responsibility is to make a profit for the shareholders. And so he said it's more complex than that, but that's the basic how everybody understands it, that idea, okay, profit's what matters. We got to maximize profit. We got to maximize profit. Or the opposite is, no, profit's greed. Profit's bad. Let's not have profit. And I think what you're saying is that profit is not the be-all and end-all. Profit is a measure of whether you're doing certain things well. But to reject profit is actually also an error. And that, in fact, profit is a signal of whether you're providing value for others. Where in a nonprofit, you may be able to have a great marketing campaign, you may be able to do— you might be able to get donors to get behind you, but you're actually not necessarily providing value for the people you're trying to help. You're providing value for your own, say, emotional gratification and your donors. but not necessarily for the people you're trying to help. And again, to say these things are complex, poverty is complex. There's no single solution. But I think if I'm understanding you, you're getting to this point like we shouldn't make profit the be-all end-all, but we should also embrace it as something valuable. Is that right?

There's— yes. And, you know, we didn't stop at profit. What, what, what we have to avoid is also this, the chasing over the value of a company, which is really the stock market price. Right. And because the stock market price— see, an owner of a stock, of a share of a publicly traded company, is that the owner of the company? It doesn't quite fit that category anymore because they hold it on average less than a year. And they're not holding a company because of the company. They're holding a company as a mechanism to manage their money. And so if we start to run company according to that, stock market, which fluctuates every day, then we're starting to take the nature of the company itself out of it. We're starting to misalign the incentives of the company and of what the purpose of the company is from it. And so sort of, yeah, the word for it is to financialize the company. And there is with the— and if we reward our management, for example, with this, let's say with stock options and incentive stock options. And so we don't just do this to management, we do this to others as well. But let's say primarily management. What this does is it makes them— it makes management focus on very, very short-term issues and emotions in the market that may have and usually don't have anything to do with the company itself. It doesn't need— the company doesn't have to be profitable to have a high market valuation. Look at Amazon. They became a multibillion-dollar company without ever showing a profit. I mean, it's not— so it's not all about profit. It's about expectations and market value and so on. What we need to do when we say reward, and this is sort of the example that I was so impressed with what Art Sioka did in his company, the Wine Group. He also has these, in a sense, stock options like the management. It's a management-owned company. It's not a public company. It's a management-owned company. And if you become a manager, you can— you're invited to become a part shareholder. And the trick is this: usually these shares— well, I did this 100 times, and the shares have a 3-year cliff. Like, after a year, you can start to sell. You earn them, and then you start to— depending on the plan, you're going to be able to sell them. But, you know, and there's, you know, there's rules and regulations for it. But, but in essence, you can buy— you can buy and sell your shares in 5 years, and you'll be done. In Arcs company, you can only sell your shares during the time that your successor runs what you're doing. Think about this. The average time this takes for these people is over 10 years. So now if you're moving the reward focus, the time focus for the reward to a span of 10 years, Then you're starting to behave in a way that is actually good for the business and the people in the business.

So it's aligned for long-term success is your point. Yeah.

Long-term value creation.

Okay. So let's move then. 3 is the key to success in a business is its culture, and the CEO is the keeper of that culture. And you say, the CEO sets the tone for how the business operates, and everyone else follows the CEO's lead. The CEOs lead, whether you realize it or not. That's the truth. So here you've talked. I think you probably a lot of what you said has already has already been in this. But but here you you give a huge role to the CEO and to leadership to set the standards. So in this in the book you're working on, what would you say to someone who's a CEO? What are two immediately practical things that the CEO can do, and what are maybe two biggest pitfalls to avoid?

So the first thing is to examine yourself for your core values. Why am I doing this? And what am I trying to get out of this? And a self-examination may mean that you recognize that your priorities or your values are mistaken and you can change. That's the first thing. Start with yourself, do a self-examination, and in a sense, and this is something I try to do with every one of my students, to do a development plan for yourself. You know, you can change and you can grow in your values and you can refine yourself and your tastes and your desires in a way that better fits human excellence and your excellence. So this kind of self-improvement on that level is critical for a CEO. If you just say, well, this is just, you know, I'm just building this product and get it out as fast as possible, The most important thing you contribute to this company is not the product idea. The most important thing you contribute to this company is the culture you create. And the culture you create— and that comes to the second thing— is not what you say, it's what you do. How do you think it would feel to be working in a company that's run by Jeff Bezos or Jeff Skilling of Enron or Larry Ellison at Oracle or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, the most famous example. And how does their personality and their values translate into how they treat you rather than they say one thing and then what's actually going on in the company? More often than not, actually every time unless the CEO is really careful about this, their personal values become the company values. That's why at Enron, this kind of, we're the smartest people in the room, which basically translates into, you're an idiot. If I'm dealing with you, you're the idiot, translates into a company culture that projects into the future a disaster. A utility.

I have a couple— let me ask a couple of questions. So, okay, I mean, I think start with the self, have a development plan for yourself. I mean, this is also part of, you know, it's also clearly part of the Catholic tradition and other traditions that you do do an examination of conscience. You think about who you are, you have a plan for yourself. But it's it. So let me just push. Like it's it's easy to think you're doing that. So I'm trying to get a little practical. It's easy. I mean, I could say, you know, if I'm running something, it's easy for me to look at the faults of others, not see the faults of myself.

Yeah.

And and you know, there's a there's a venture capitalist guy follow on Twitter, Joseph Flaherty. I think is how you say his name. And one of my favorite one of my favorite tweets. He said somebody had said, I don't know who it was, but somebody had said, like, they're an entrepreneur and they get up every morning and they drink as much water as they possibly can with their mouth, handfuls of water until they're ready to throw up and go out there. And Joseph Flaherty says something like, this is a paraphrase, but you don't have to be weird and idiosyncratic to be a great entrepreneur.

Exactly.

And I think there's something in today's world with some hyperutilitarianism. You see it in, like, you know, a certain type of modern attachment to Stoicism, but it's really kind of a modern hybrid utilitarian Stoicism. It's— you see it in some of the stuff that Tim Ferriss does, you know. And I mean, I learned some things from Tim Ferriss, but there's like some real fundamental anthropological problems underlying that. But that it can be easily turned to— just trying to think here— like this kind of glorification of self. Right. So the reality is we're blind, or we tend to be blind to our own moral failures.

Right.

So I guess my question for you is, the bigger and more powerful and wealthier you become and the more set in your ways as you get older, and you've got people around you who are affirming you all the time.

The smarter and the funnier you get.

Yeah, you're funnier, you're smarter. I mean, like, your hair gets better and better.

I know.

And so, uh, and so you— I mean, the, the facts are, I mean, it's— there's a lot of kind of, how do I say, self-serving, almost, um, this idea like I have to control my day. And I mean, you can just really become very selfish very quickly. And I mean, I, I think that's the reality with all of us. I mean, I think you know it, I know it. Um, So everybody's telling you to self-examine and be tough on yourself, but it doesn't really work. I mean, I'm trying to be difficult. I would say, what makes your approach different? Let me say, what makes your approach any different from all the other stuff I hear that really is just kind of self-absorbed stuff?

It doesn't make it any better. What I'm proposing is to simply— and I'm not even suggesting what your values ought to be. All I'm saying is that you should look, you should say, why am I doing this? What is the end of this? Let me be really clear to the outside what it is that I want and what I am so that I'm actually not lying about what I'm doing. And then to signal the heck out of this, to say it and to act on it so that I will attract like-minded people. One of the things that Art did from the beginning is he had, you know, and this is very— these company values are very personal. This is why it's crazy to have HR come up with this. This is the founder, it's like the DNA of the company that Art has an allergic reaction to politics in business, like to office politics, because he always felt like this created the worst products and the dumbest outcome. And so he says, whenever I become a CEO or I run a company, politics got to go out. And so of course, this is one of his core values. It's a pet peeve. So he immediately got to work on it. Then he had other values which have to do with his background, like with trust and honesty and things like that. And he was very aware of these of himself and started to not only talk about them, but then to act on them, to say, if this is what I hold true, what does somebody who holds this true act on? For example, right when Art took over this company, the wine group, they were so badly in debt and they were such in a precarious situation that one of the things that they made, a product, a vermouth product they made, went bad. And like 250,000 gallons of this thing just tipped and it went bad. Then they did research and this and that and said, well, it's still consumable and it really is only visually bad. You can actually sell it and just make the bottle a bit darker and nobody would notice. Everybody's watching. Everybody's watching. If you say, let's just sell it anyway, you basically tell everybody that the dollar is the king. If you sell it for a market where you private label it and sell it to the dollar store or something like that, then you say, well, the dollar is sort of half king of it, but we make the best of it. What Art decided to do is to have the people who made this mistake destroy the product and come up with a process that this doesn't happen again. He didn't fire them. He didn't sell the product. He didn't want to even sell it for a lower price. He just said, let's redo this. What we're doing is a craft. We're artisans. When something doesn't work and we know a product isn't as good as we could do it, nobody ought to consume it. So let's get rid of it. and start over and find a way to do this better. What he put in the center, in the value, is human excellence. You see, and no amount of writing this on the wall of the factory or the winery or anything would have portrayed that as in him betting the farm on this, that when it comes down, push comes to shove, he's gonna go for quality over money.

So I think, so in a sense that maybe there's two, two things. I mean, so to push back on you a little bit, I mean, you are, in fact, I think, saying you're not, in a sense, choosing the specific values of a corporation, but you are saying in your principled entrepreneurship that there are principles and that you'd like— we're going to talk about win-win in a minute. But the idea that the person's at the center, that people should not be exploited. But I think if I'm understanding this then a little bit better, your point is that the reality is The CEO is the, in a sense, the keeper of the culture and the creator of the culture. And if you're running a company as an entrepreneur, you must be aware of that. And if you're not aware of that, then you're going to create a lot of pathologies in your company that you don't even know you're doing. And so you have to be really attentive because if you want a healthy company and you want a healthy workplace and you want to actually live out those principles of persons not being objects, then writing it on the wall is not enough. You've got to live it, and you have to be more attentive than you realize. Is that your point?

It's this circle because I do this case with my classes all the way and all the time. And what they're saying is, but if we don't do this, we won't be profitable. If we do this, we risk our company. The bottom line is this. If this is a good idea and you manage this company in such a transparent and honest way, you will be profitable. Now, if you cannot be, if it's not such a good idea and you run it transparently and honestly, you will not be profitable. And that's okay, because then the company needs to go out of business. thinking as the bottom line that a company just needs to be there. Like, there's bad ideas and there's bad companies, not in evil, but bad in a stupid idea, or, or this should— nobody should be doing this. What we do is—

People don't want it.

We make up later on shortcuts, bad shortcuts, to prop up companies that should actually go away and release the resources of this company to start something Yeah.

Okay. So let's— I mean, there's more we can talk about, but let's go to number 4 and 5. I know we— 4 is business should be viewed as a win-win for all parties rather than a zero-sum game of I win, you lose.

That's a natural lead-in to what I—

Yeah. Okay. So go from there then.

Look, one of the foundational things that's being misunderstood and that we have to understand when you do business is that when we say free market, Mainly what we mean is that you and I, we want to do business. I should be free to say, I sell this pen here and I want X dollars for it. And you should be free to say, I want that pen, but I only pay this much for it. And then if we freely, between you and me, freely arrive at a decision of what this pen is worth for you to buy and for me to sell, When we do this in a free market, then the transfer of this product against money is if I sell it, I sell it intrinsically for more than it's worth to me, otherwise I wouldn't sell it. If you buy it, you buy it only for less than it's intrinsically worth to you, otherwise you wouldn't buy it either. Therefore, When we do a free market transaction, there's always a win-win situation. There is a surplus. So let's pause for a second.

Let's pause for just a second.

Okay.

So I want to say 2 things. So one is that's the idea of the mutual benefit of trade, right? So that you and I, we both engage for something. I'm paying a value that I think it's worth and you're selling it for what you think it's worth. I think one important thing, and this is— we won't go down this rabbit trail, but I think it's important because I think it underlies some of our discussion. Is that a free market is shorthand for a embedded like that that that exchange is embedded in rule of law, private property, free exchange, the government preventing information. I just want to say because the reason I bring that up is because I think you and I know this and we're speaking shorthand. But I think a listener could say, well, what do you mean by a free free market? I think it's important that we make that distinction that it's not simply Radical. So having said that, now you're in— your argument's a win-win. So here's my question. Are you saying there's no zero-sum games in exchange?

Oh, there are. And one of my key points in this, which comes in later as well, is that you see a large amount, an increasing amount of people think that the economy is a zero-sum game, which is like poker. If I lose, you win. If you win, I lose. So that the value actually is not what I just described, that we both win, but the economy is seen as a dog-eat-dog world. This is very, very dangerous and of huge and important consequences. And look, I've seen it— But they're right sometimes, aren't they? Huh?

Aren't they right sometimes?

Well, and here's how this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have seen people who behave in the market because they say, look, oh, this is how you play this game. This is like a zero-sum game. Okay. And they go out and they actually behave in a predatory way in the marketplace. And there are, as we all know, there are people like this, which then say, hey, this is sort of why I hate this sentence. It's only business, nothing personal. What do you mean nothing personal? Business is all about the person. What are you telling me, nothing personal? This is all personal. So whenever you hear this sentence, you meet somebody who doesn't believe in zero— in win-win situations. If you have one of the most famous philanthropists in the world says, look, when I do business, it's a dog-eat-dog world. I know it's immoral and I have to do it. If I won't do it, somebody else will. And so I just make as much money as possible, and then later on I do philanthropy and I sort of try to— that's how I live with myself. This is so dangerous. This has infected society to the point that you, in fact, that the laws that are being called for are protecting against the people who violate the actual game of what we're trying to do. It's almost like if you suddenly introduce American football players into a soccer match and they're actually playing 2 different games.

So let me— so what you're saying, correct me if I misunderstood you, but that business properly understood should be a win-win mutual benefit of trade. It can be abused and it is abused and it creates— and some people approach this zero-sum game. Of course, when that happens, it ends up undermining the, the social fabric. And so people look for more and more regulations on business. And some regulations on business, of course, are important. You need— you want those, you need those, of course. But the— but what happens is you get some more regulations on business and then it actually— what actually unfortunately happens is there's regulatory capture by those very businesses who actually were sometimes predatory in the first place. So it actually makes the situation worse. Is that your argument?

If it's a zero-sum game, then it's the survival of the fittest, or let's say the rule of the strongest, and whoever's the strongest bullies everybody. Now then you can choose, then the government comes in and says, oh, we can't have that game, we'll do it. And so then you replace one strongman with another strongman. So either it's this business oligarch or whatever, the images of that. who strong-arms everybody their way, or we say, well, in order to keep that guy in control, we need to have the government do it, and then the government becomes the bully. Whereas the actual game that we're playing here, the actual role of business is to have this opportunity where everybody can participate, and as long as we create value for each other, where there there is a win-win situation. That doesn't, of course, mean that nobody will ever cheat or anything like that. What it means is that the middle of the road and the focus of our economy should be on these win-win transactions.

And so what—

Diminish if we move the market away. That is what happens on Main Street. You know how they say that Main Street and Wall Street? That is what happens on Main Street. It behooves us to keep the business and the focus of business on Main Street.

Okay. So I think one— if I'm again understanding you, I think one of the things you're saying is that, look, there's huge problems in political economy and politics and society and morality. But one thing you can do about it is if you run a company or you're working in company, you take these principles of principled entrepreneurship and apply them in your own company. And you may not solve all the problems of the world, but you can actually solve— you can solve the problems little by little by transforming your own companies to have this vision, a proper understanding of business, a proper understanding of the mutual benefit of trade and win-win, and a proper understanding of creating goods. And so it's almost like— so because in one sense, I guess what I'm— what I'm saying here is that in one sense, when you hear you talk, it's very theoretical. But in another sense, you're saying, actually, yes, we need the people to address the questions of political economy. Of course, those need to be addressed. But for a lot of people, you can't do that. That's not where you are. But you do have a company and you can change your company to make sure that it's operating on principled entrepreneurship. And this will be, in a sense, a grassroots micro shift of the political economy because we have to do it right, even if the system's broken.

The promise of this book is that if you do behave like this, it does work. Still today, it works. And I'm showing examples of how people are doing this and that this works.

Okay, so let's go to the end then. Your last one says entrepreneurship doesn't stop when a business becomes successful. Everyone in a company should have an ownership mentality and act as entrepreneurs. And so I want to talk about that. But one of the things that I've heard you talk about before And maybe this comes from Art Sioka, but it's— what's that? You say you're either an entrepreneur or a harvester, right? You're either a grower, you're either building something.

Yeah.

What is it?

You're a creator or a harvester.

A creator or a harvester. And I think so in one sense, that's the— I like— maybe you can talk a little bit about that. But, and then I have a couple of maybe pushback questions for you. But why don't you explain number 5, that you're either a creator or harvester, always have to be an entrepreneur. Once you develop that.

The always have to be an entrepreneur is— I very much identify this idea here with, in a way, the American dream. I don't mean America alone, but America was the soil of the American dream because it left out structured society or caste and politics and all of that and just basically gave these free market transactions and value creation a right chance. That's why this created social mobility and what we today know as the American dream. Now, the American dream basically is a Harvard— is a creator approach to say, I can do this, and you get in and you start to do your thing, and you find your excellence, and you find a market niche, and you go in there and you create value, and you constantly keep doing this because as you get something back, you put it back into the business and you lean forward. You're participating, you're working at this, and you're doing this. Maybe at the end of your career, um, you say, okay, it's time for me to retire, and you lean back, and then you have your last few years, or hopefully a few decades, where you can harvest. And you, you know, it's your end of your career, and you can harvest, uh, your well-earned reward. What we're looking at, what we're trend— what we're trending into, is to start to have large portions of our economy become harvesters, that the actual activity of the business is to harvest the value rather than to create it. That is both detrimental to those companies because they're being hollowed out, if you wish, because if you're not— if you don't reinvest and if you're not focusing on creating, then the harvesting basically just makes everything go away, and then once it's gone, it's gone. And on the other hand, it destroys the American dream. Because if it's not constantly creating and constantly changing, then what you're starting to do is to freeze social mobility. You're starting to not allow people to rise and fall in the ranks with their businesses and do well and not so well and come back and so on and so forth. This plays out both in the economy at large, which most people are very surprised by this, but Entrepreneurship was 4 times higher in the 1970s than it is today. Just because we have a lot of high-tech startups doesn't mean there's a lot of startups in the United States. We're actually entrepreneurship poor today.

IPOs have decreased too, right? Public offerings? Those have decreased quite dramatically as well.

some other reasons because, because there's mergers and/or acquisitions more, you know, that's really the exit play of most companies is acquisition today and not an IPO. But, um, but I'm just saying that there's, in comparison to like the '70s, way few, uh, fewer, um, entrepreneurs and also fewer of the mom-and-pop shops and companies that actually created value on an ongoing basis and basically didn't play this exit, you know, the exit game, if you wish, becoming a harvester where they would continue to be creators. And—

Look, I pause you for a second. Can I pause for a second? Just explain this real quick. So I think that's an interesting— I don't want to go too far off of your principle, but I think it's just— it's interesting. I mean, I think one would not expect there to be that entrepreneurship would be 4 times higher in the 1970s. I think it's 70.

I have to check the exact number, but something like that.

Yeah, más o menos around there, right? But anyway, it's higher. I mean, one would think this is the age of entrepreneurship, this is the age where entrepreneurs are celebrated, and yet it's lower. I mean, so without going into, you know, too much detail, I mean, what are one or two of the reasons you think that? I mean, part of it's the harvester.

So it's the mentality where we're more interested in getting stuff out of it than putting it in. Into it. There is the, the, the coming about of the larger and larger companies, because if the way the financial markets work, it gives larger companies more and more cash, and they start to distort, if you wish, some of the free market dynamics. And, um, and then the government gets involved and creates rules and regulations that just by definition block out the small companies. I mean, if you need If you need permits and licenses for everything from hair braiding to, I don't know, serving some food somewhere or creating a dish or selling some, it just becomes so inefficient to start a business that the average person just can't start a company anymore. The hurdles and the barriers to entry are so high.

Is there any— yeah, I interviewed Joel Salatin on this podcast, and he wrote a book called Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

Yeah.

Which is a great title about—

But, it is not impossible. Look, I work with hundreds of companies who do this. It is not impossible. Part of what I want to be careful in our message here is, this is not a doomsday thing.

Right.

I sort of think this comes off as a bit negative. I'm not negative at all. I'm saying, actually, that we have a huge opportunity to turn the ship and to actually rectify it. And for example, one of the, you know, we're doing in this COVID crisis, and this is a horrible crisis, and I've seen so many small companies go under. At the same time, it's a bit like fall and spring. At the same time as many of these trees have fallen and leaves let go and as things die, there will be a spring of this, and the opportunities are tremendous for an entrepreneurial resurgence.

What do you think some of those opportunities are?

It depends on how you look at it. I think that there's a lot of the chains that went around, for example, restaurant chains. Here in DC, we deal a lot with food. A lot of the large restaurant chains had such slim margins and so little reserves that they sort of went by the wayside. And that opens up a lot of small opportunities for small food to come in. I think there is a— because people get more interested in being at home and actually doing stuff again, they're very interested in more highly high-quality manufacturing things, which is of course the strength of the, the small and medium-sized businesses and the startups. And so there's a huge resurgence of that kind of thing. And then online, I think the whole cottage industry of of, see, they're used to, in the beginning when the internet took over, there is a strong trend of disintermediation, where it's just everything gets streamlined, which is to a large extent actually a good idea because it makes things more efficient and in a sense better. But there is, there starts to be, I see in the market, there starts to be a trend where people want personal attention again. And people love quality, people love interaction.

Mm-hmm.

And they're happy to pay a little bit more for it. And that opens up a million of opportunities for small businesses.

Not— So real quick on—

The myth I want to fight is that, and I write a little bit about this, but more of this will be in my classes, is I don't mean by entrepreneurship that somebody goes, eureka, I figured out some new way of doing something. and I find a new product or something like that. No, an entrepreneur is somebody who creates value, and I can create value very simply. Every one of the students in my class creates value. I had a freshman class of 180 students last fall. Every student started a business, 180 businesses that they ran for 3 months. It's very easy to add value with Amazon and dropshipping and everything. actually push yourself in the middle. There's so many choices out there, people don't know what to choose anymore. And you put yourself, you intermediate rather than disintermediate, you put yourself in the middle and say, look, I have an expertise in this, let me help you figure out what to get and how to get it. And there's a value in this. And even though you haven't innovated anything, entrepreneurship is not the same as innovation. And, um, and there's you know, immense opportunities out there. I'm— I look at the whole situation as the glass half full, fundamentally.

So, uh, one is when, you know, I have a question for you, but actually one other thing is, um, at Acton, uh, I directed a project called The Good Society, uh, which has a number of videos.

And one of them is—

are you in one of— you're in one of them, I think. But then they went, maybe not. There's one called What Is an Entrepreneur? Where we look at— we ask the question, what does it actually mean to be an entrepreneur? And we talk about the creation of value. Just a really quick— again, just really quick, you say entrepreneurship and innovation are not the same thing. I think a lot of people would say they think of themselves— to be an entrepreneur, you should be a high-tech inventor. And another thing also that's shocking to people is a report came out. I just wrote a blog about it.

Yeah.

But some people did some reports on this, some studies that the average age of the entrepreneur is over 40.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people kind of assume, oh, in order to be an entrepreneur, you're going to be kind of a young tech whiz. But actually, it's in your 40s and your 50s, you start to have experience, you have connections. Yeah. You have what Aristotle called phronesis. He actually has a great line. He says something to the effect of young people are really good at geometry, but they don't have phronesis. They don't have experience. And so, and I think that's a way of also thinking about opportunity. You don't— in some sense, the myth of the high-tech entrepreneur— and you're involved in a lot of high-tech companies, and we need more of them, right?

And there is that too, is that one of the reasons, of course, why the age of the entrepreneur keeps going up is that there's also often in the current job market almost a kind of a prejudice towards people who are over 50, 55, 60. And when somebody still has that desire or need to get involved and to do and create value and so on, that they are veritably shut out. And I know lots of entrepreneurs who started that way and say, well, let me do this myself. And they do so very successfully.

Well, I'm— we're— I want to— don't want to take too much of your time. Thanks a lot, Andreas. Always good to see you. Um, tell me a couple of like big, big questions. So you've been working on this book, you're teaching entrepreneurship. Uh, let me ask you, what are 3 books or key ideas that have inspired you, uh, in this, in the thinking through entrepreneur, in your own entrepreneurial life, also your teaching life? What are like 1 or 2, 3 books that you think Everybody should read, what do you suggest?

There's a book that Charles Koch just published called Believe in People. And he wrote a previous book called Good Profit, which is actually using this term principled entrepreneurship. And I have to say that that's actually his term, but I'm defining it at this point. But he's putting the principled entrepreneurship into that. Into Believe in People, which is looking at some of the social issues that we deal with in the cities and urban areas and all kinds of things and say, how can these principles of business and entrepreneurship make a difference? That we put the person at the center of these social issues and then enable them and give them the dignity to find their way out of this, to enable people for self-determination and self and growth out of things, that when somebody actually has a path out of poverty, that we actually go back to focus on solving poverty situations rather than just managing them.

Yeah. And I know you've— I mean, we didn't talk about this, which is maybe another— you've done a lot of work with poverty, not only in the developing world, but also domestic poverty in the United States through your work at CatholicU. Then, any other classic, older book that has always inspired you?

Well, actually, I'm doing a little bit more of the more modern reading, but I'll tell you one book that I just printed out a couple of things on, which just— I know it's an oldie, but it's a goodie. It's called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. You can thank me later. But this is one— must be one of the most brilliant books ever written.

Who's the author?

Al Ries and Jack Trout. These are 2 guys who had a marketing agency outside of New York. It's worth a whole other broadcast. One of the friends of Art Theokas, a guy called Dino Cordopassi, introduced me. I mean, I've had the book, I've read the book in the '90s, but I didn't follow up on it. But this guy Dino Cordopassi actually introduced me to this again, and he— this was his agency, and he created with their help one of the largest canned tomato companies in the world. Just an amazing story. Again, because I'm following up with these kinds of entrepreneurs, this book is gold. It's relatively short. It's very focused on understanding these kinds of laws, just like what I'm saying You understand principles, and it really adds value. I think it's a good complement to what I'm writing, where I'm writing more of the why. How do you find your why of the company and your intentionality? This book very much hits where the rubber hits the road of saying, okay, now that we know why we're doing, let's see what we're doing. Now let's see how we're going to do this. This book is going to be gold.

Okay, so your book is going to come out probably 2022, I'm going to guess?

Early '22, I think. Yeah. Early '22.

Okay, good. And so, uh, where can people find you?

So you can find me just if you Google Andreas Widmer, CUA, Catholic University of America. Very easy to find. And then I'm also on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Okay, and I'll put links to all those things and to the books you recommended There on the Moral Imagination website.

I want to thank you, Michael. You're a great inspiration to me. A lot of the things, a lot of things I'm doing, you know, I first always try them out on you because I know you have a good head on your shoulder. But also a lot of times I'm arguing with this. In the early days, I would actually go to your classes at Acton University. And I don't know if I ever told you, but I still have notes from that. It's hugely inspiring. A lot of the things that I'm saying, of course, have something to do with some of the things you inspired me to. So thanks.

Oh, well, thank you. Likewise. You're always an inspiration. Always learn from you. So thanks for joining the Moral Imaginations Podcast, Andreas, and hope to have you back.

It'd be my honor. All right.

All the best. Thanks.

Thank you.