Reboot Lessons From The Pope and The Entrepreneur - Andreas Widmer

Welcome to another episode of the Reboot Chronicles, a no-holds-barred forum with global leaders, authors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs about how organizations stay focused on growth and innovation in unprecedented times. I'm your host, Dean DeBias, coming to you live from Revive's North American headquarters in Chicago, and we would like to thank you for joining us from around the globe today. I'd like to welcome Andreas Widmer to the Reboot Chronicles. He is the director of the Siocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America's Busch School of Business and Economics, which aims to promote a new kind of entrepreneur. We'll find out what that means. Andreas is the author of a couple of books. One that I like is The Pope and the CEO, which is chock-full of leadership lessons that he learned as a Swiss Guard protecting Pope John Paul II. Good to see you, Andreas. Thanks for joining us.

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

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I just love when you were a young lad, as we say, you filled out an application to join the Swiss Guard, which somehow got accepted. But instead of them like giving you a behind-the-scenes job or an admin role, which I would think would be the first thing you do, you were selected to, you know, personally guard now Saint John Paul II. I mean, what a serendipitous moment for you. I just am fascinated by that. And I'm really curious as You know, that journey, of course. And how did that change the course of your life?

A lot. And as you say, jokingly, is actually true. How they ever chose me or allowed me in there beats me. I was not a good student. I, you know, I wasn't in a huge amount of trouble, but I grew up in this small village of 400 people. You can't get into that much trouble. But whatever trouble I could get into, I did. And I was not exactly the front light of our class. I was more on the tail light end. You know, much later I find out I have ADD and dyslexia and so on, which back then nobody knew about.

Right.

But so I just couldn't really find my place. The only thing I excelled at as a young man is physical fighting and performance, like sports and physical fighting.

Oh, yes.

And so I went into the military. You know, I'm the youngest of 6. I have 4 older brothers. So I, you know, we were wrestling and stuff all the time. And so that's the one thing I excelled at. And that's why when I learned I could become a bodyguard, I'm like, that's what I want to do. And if I would have known how difficult it was to get in the selection, I would have not had the self-confidence to apply. But I didn't know. Thank God there was no internet back then. And I just, I didn't even know anything about it. I just applied. And then lo and behold, I show up and I wasn't very religious. I'm Catholic, but I grew up Catholic, but I wasn't really practicing my faith or so. I just felt like I had nothing against the Pope. So whatever, as long as I can be a bodyguard, I'll do it. And so I show up there and very early on I started to first regret that I joined, which was because it was much harder than I thought. Like, this is a tight, very strongly run military.

It's like Green Beret training or Marine Corps.

It's a special force and there is no There's no hiding there. There's only about 130. Well, there is only 130. When I was there, 115 of us, and they're on top of you and you do exactly what they're saying. And it was, it was rough.

It was. So first you got in and then you actually made it through boot camp.

Then I had to go through the boot camp again.

I would never make it through boot camp. But you look like you're a pretty tall person. Those of you watching on YouTube, you look pretty—

I'm 6'9.

You could definitely take me out, I think.

And I was, I was much lighter then, of course, but I was very— I was was a wiry, tall, tenacious guy. Like, I could— I had endurance. Yeah. So I did the Swiss military and I did the officer school there. And then I came to Rome and I did the boot camp all over again with the Swiss Guards. I kind of regretted to enter because it was, you know, Rome is chaotic and I missed my family and everything.

Mm-hmm.

And I felt like I made a mistake to join and was gloomy. And this is when the first time when the change happened is that, you know, when you're working with somebody, being a Swiss Guard sort of looks glamorous to the outside, but on the inside, you're like a cut above the valet. I mean, you're just, as a bodyguard, you're supposed to blend into the background and just don't say anything. And just, if nobody notices you, you do a good job.

Yeah, that's one version of it. Then the other version is the very colorful wardrobes that some of the honor guards have.

That you do also as a very young recruit. Before you get sent into duty, you start to stand at the outside. I mean, this is basically a statue. You don't have to do anything other than just stand there and listen.

Yeah.

But I had the first job of actually being at the apartment where John Paul lived, and I was very gloomy, and he came and he noticed. He noticed that I hated my job and that I didn't want to be there. And he approached me and he says, look, I'm so glad you're here. I want to work with you and you'll see things are going to work out. And he started to pay attention to me in a sort of even level. He integrated me into his team. He checked up on me and said, how are you feeling? And so on.

Right.

To the point that I really started to feel that I was a part of his ministry, if you wish. He would introduce me to guests when he had guests. He would introduce me and say, hey, look, this is Andreas, even though I'm supposed to be in the background. And I started to love working for— he always hated— he didn't ever want you to say, I work for you. He says, no, we work with each other.

Right.

Like nobody works for anybody. We work with each other. And so, he really got engaged and I started to love working for him. And I also started to really love him. And he definitely became a huge role model for me. I have to say, he led me then into practicing my faith, taught me how to pray.

Of course.

And just taught me the deeper meaning of life and really the self-recognition of who I am. And that helped me then over my sort of inadequacies or feelings of inadequacies. He helped me over all of that. And I served there for 2 years until I left. And I left a changed man. A lot of my sort of issues in terms of— maybe I had a bit of a chip on the shoulder when I was younger. Maybe that's where some of my problems came from.

Sure.

That all went away, and I really, he really changed my life. I find it was one of the pivot points, the real inflection points of my life, the time I spent with him.

You know, he was one of my mom's, not one of, he was my mom's favorite Pope, and she'd seen a lot of them. When he visited Chicago, it was a national holiday, and people 30, 40 years later, gosh, it's 50 years now, still talk about it today. the day that he came to Chicago, the week. And he's been to many places, but it wasn't just because there was a massive Polish community there. It was like he was the most relatable teacher. You probably had the best mentor on the globe in that century. You know, I can think of a few other people, but—

Yep.

And then you went on to write a book about it, which was— I don't know how you got permission for this, but it's called The Pope and the CEO. I recommend that listeners pick this up because I just think it's got some amazing lessons in it. So that's, yeah, that's kind of where I was going. What did you learn from him that can kind of help leaders?

So I didn't write the book right away. You know, when you have a mentor or a role model, I want to say like that, takes you a while to digest. They sort of leave seeds with you. They plant thoughts and ideas. And they sprout much later. I came to America because, you know, that's the other thing, Dean. When I was in Rome, I met this girl who was an American exchange student, or she went for a year, not just a semester. She was a year abroad. She's from Chicago, actually. She went to Loyola University and they have a campus there. And I met this young American girl. I didn't speak a lick of English, by the way, but I met her.

Oh my God.

She studied French and Italian. And so we spoke in French and Italian to each other. And I just fell in love head over heels with her.

And French and Italian and Chicago woman, what's not to fall in love with?

Exactly. And I introduced her to him and he's like, well, that's a nice girl that you have there. And I just, I said, listen, I gotta go. I'm gonna go pursue her. And he's like, well, you have my blessing, go ahead. And I came to America because I fell in love with Michelle and came here and started to, the only way to get into the US was to go to school. So I did. I also didn't know any English, so this school gave me a huge break to basically say, just come here and then see if you ever go below a certain grade, then we'll kick you out. And I learned English very quickly, and then I moved to Boston and I started to meet these other students. I didn't go to MIT, but these were MIT students.

Yeah.

And they had this— they told me that they had this product, uh, this— and we're talking about 1989, '90. They had this product, they ported this Unix protocol, um, you know, to the PC, and they call it TCP/IP, and this would enable the internet for the PC and stuff. To me, this meant nothing. I, I had never used a computer in my life before, but I spoke all these languages. And they say, you are exactly the kind of guy we need. And so to make a long story short, they asked me to join them, and I said, look, I don't even have a work permit. And they said, that's great because we can't pay you.

Exactly.

And so I joined them. They could have They wouldn't have had to pay me. They let me go to Europe to visit once in a while during my break, but they gave me shares and said, look, one day, who knows? And lo and behold, it was FTP Software and we were a rocket ship. Oh, yeah.

You guys took off. Wow.

And we took off. We went public in '93, I think. And so, I got sucked in right away into the high-tech boom. After that, I joined Dragon Systems. We invented speech recognition.

Right.

And I went again into this total whirlwind up. And I kind of, I did a couple of more things and I kind of got so sucked in that I sort of lost sight of who I am or what am I doing or why am I doing this? I lost sight of my why. And I started to hate my job again, just like when I worked with JP2.

Right.

And that reminded me that when I, You know, I was— I kind of got depressed with the job. I felt that everything is a crisis, an existential crisis in my company, even when I'm running it.

And in tech startups, that is what is— that's exactly what's happening.

I'm looking for a boss to blame, and I'm the boss, right? And so, I really— I would say I got burnt out with it. And then a few things happened that were just really unpleasant. I talk about it in that book.

Yeah.

That kind of brought me back to the ground and say, okay, what is this all about? And, and is this experience you're having of participating in the free market innovation, the freedom to do business and do this globally and everything, does this have to lead to this state of disillusionment and so on? Or is this a way— is there a way to do this that actually leads to human freedom? And that's what this book, The Pope and the Sea, answers, because I went back to my drawing board and also back to him to basically say, okay, let me reflect on this. I sort of lost the forest for the trees for a while in my career and then refound it. And that's what this book is about. And in there are the main lessons that I reflect back and get out of the situations, the conversations, and And the writings that he had that I drew from him. And then going forward, you know, in the next companies, I started to apply that.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I, I often— I mean, having been a CEO of many companies, I've been in those situations where you lose— you just lose it, the feeling. And so I teach a little bit of this at Kellogg where helping MBA students who are already working, you know, keep that passion alive and And I said, after all these years, I kind of bring 3 things together. It's like fun, money, and impact. And in the middle of that Venn diagram, most people would tell you that's where you find your purpose. And that's a trap. It's false. It's like if you can get any 2 of those in a job or a project or something, it's a fleeting time. It could be a year, but you're going to be having a good sense of purpose and meaning.

Yeah.

But you're not always making impact. You're not always making a lot of money and you're not always having fun. And I struggle with that a lot. And you did a new book on, the most recent one anyway, The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. And I think you touch on some of those concepts in your own format. How do you teach people or help people, I guess, through the book, but also at the university, you know, find the right thing to do, I guess, is the right question.

I'd love to tell you just a quick story of why I wrote that book and how. because that tells you how I went about it.

It's exactly— The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship?

Yeah.

Yeah, that'd be great.

That's exactly, Dean, what you just talked about, the meaning of this Venn diagram and everything. And to really figure out, you know, looking back at the career, what was it? I have this great friend who I believe is one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the last 70, 80 years. His name is Art Sioka. what you know today as the wine industry in the United States.

Yeah, amazing story.

But I mean like table wine. I don't mean, you know, highfalutin French wine, but I mean mass product table wine that taught— that brought this to the American palate, if you wish. But anyway, so I know him for many years and he's a good friend and he actually helped fund what I'm doing here because we have a history which I explain in the book. But I call him one day and say, listen, Art, I want to write this book about principle entrepreneurship, what we're teaching here at our center and everything. And I wonder if you would allow me to tell more of your story. And it was in February 2020. And he said, I remember he's in San Francisco and I was actually in Rome at the time. And he says, well, Andreas, I am— I thank you for asking me, but I have good news and bad news in the answer.

Mm-hmm.

And I said, well, hit me with the bad news first. And he says, I have 3 months to live. My last— the cancer came back. The doctor said he can't help me. I'm, I'm going to be dead in 3 months. And then this is so like him. And then I go, huh? So what's the good news? And he says, I have no appointments until then. So I— this is how he— this is how he— this is how— this is Art 1A. And he says, if you have the time, I have all the time in the world now until I die. I will talk to you about anything you want to talk about. And I have a lot to say. I'm looking back at my career. So, I had this chance then. I started to record everything he said and we would meet on the phone and I asked him questions. I record everything and say, I could always finish the book after you're gone. And out of these 3 months, actually, he didn't die in 3 months. He died in 2 years.

All right.

And he saw the end of the book. And I had this huge privilege to sit sort of at the feet of this teacher. And what I put in the book is here we have an 86-year-old great entrepreneur who tells you at the end of his life, looking back, what counts, what should you do, what should you not do, and how should you do it. And to look at the entirety, because this— many of you watching or listening to this, you're in the moment, you're 30 years old, 35 years old, and you're just at this company. But this company is not going to last forever. You have to look at your whole life.

Yeah.

And to talk to somebody and learn from somebody who after 86 years looks back and says, okay, as an entrepreneur, here's what matters. To me, it was one of the greatest privileges to learn, one of the greatest schools I had. And he ended up seeing the book. He loved it. And he died 3 days before it went to print, which is— he died on December 18th last year. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, such a big fan of his. I mean, and he and his wife funded your center.

Yep, yep.

It's an amazing, amazing center. What's the— it's hard to transition from that story, but what's the goal of the center? You know, principle, entrepreneurship?

You know, there's something that creeped into the American psyche over the last 20 or 30 years, and that is—

And it's not good.

Yeah, that the American dream is not a good thing. And that the free market somehow is something that hurts people, that the economy is a zero-sum game rather than, you know, you have to cut up the pie rather than the economy being a pizza shop like a pizzeria. It's just one pizza until you have to slice it, which is, of course, a zero-sum worldview.

Right.

And that creates all kinds of conflicts. It comes out in different ways of identity politics and things like that, because if there's only this much, then we can't all grow at the same time. Then we have to be adversarial with each other. And Art, at the deep level, felt that that was a big lie, that we actually here in America and really worldwide, but really can leave— can live this American dream, that every time I create something as an entrepreneur, I actually don't take value from somebody else. I make— I create value out of nothing. Right? We create new money when we innovate, when we find— when we add value for, for others, we actually create new money in a sense.

Exactly.

And Art really felt that in a lot of business schools today, that is not taught anymore. This is why then the whole movement is towards finance, because then there, there is an obvious way of saying, well, it's speculation and that, and away from the actual creation of value of products and services. And so our center is really focused on that. It's the brick and mortar. Of course, we also do software here and there, but I love the brick and mortar mainstream Main Street entrepreneurship to say that that is actually the backbone of the American economy and of our prosperity. And we both promote it and we help students build these companies.

I love that because most of the schools or and/or government institutions, um, you know, I advise the NSF and a bunch of other groups, like it's all about tech or AI or, you know, something that systemically can shape the environment or societies or just make a lot of money. But yeah, being a tech guy, that is refreshing to see. I didn't know you guys were focusing.

Yeah, look, I'm a techie, right? I can— all my companies—

I know, for you to say that's a big deal.

Yeah, I just think that See, I talk with my students about technology being— to me, it's a bit like the finance industry. It's an ancillary— I don't know if I used the right English word. It's an ancillary industry. It should be. It's the internet of things. It should be an add-on.

It should turbocharge. Exactly.

And it's not the core and it's not the end-all be-all, but it's like an add-on that makes things better, stronger, faster, and so on. But never lose sight of Main Street, because if we move away from Main Street, which we are currently moving away, the entrepreneurship today, you would never, you know, if you look around, you'd never think this, but we have like almost 60% fewer entrepreneurs today than we had in the '70s. And that is like the canary in the coal mine. Is that how you say it?

Yeah. Yeah.

That if that goes away, if we're starting and we are going underwater with this once in a while where we have fewer startups than we have companies who go out of business, then we start to have a net loss.

It's a spiral effect at that point. Yeah.

The net effect of that is to have larger and larger companies that control more and more things. And that goes then towards monopolies, oligarchies, and things like that, which is just this territory you don't want to go to for the freedom, for the prosperity of the average person.

Sounds like you and I could substitute for each other's classes that we teach. I was surprised you just said that stat because there is a liberal definition of what an entrepreneur is these days to the point where I thought the number was actually bigger because what we call entrepreneurs is not what we called it in the '70s.

Yeah.

But you're talking about people that are actually getting stuff done and starting stuff.

I mean startup entrepreneurs. Yeah. And I'm not saying I'm not like—

everyone says they're entrepreneurial now because they took a class or a seminar.

There's a difference there. I don't mind people calling themselves entrepreneurial. That's perfectly fine. I do believe that one can be an employee entrepreneur to start new projects and stuff, but I'm talking about startup entrepreneurs. Yeah, that's a special breed. I believe that it's like musicians. It's like there's only a certain amount of pianists, brilliant pianists in a society, like It's like strewn over, you know, it's like God puts salt into the dish, right, of humanity. And there's a bit of that in every society. And so we have to find these people so that they will bring their genius to all of humanity.

Exactly. And, you know, one of the things I kind of help people understand is, you know, what's the difference between an invention and an innovation? And then I say, okay, now we got that sorted out. I won't go into it here. I said, you're missing something. There's another definition called business innovation, you know, with people willing to pay the right price for it, and you can actually build a financial return.

Yep.

Versus— It's funny, isn't it? And an entrepreneur can actually dabble in all 3 of those, but the ones that are successful are create— they really create business innovation, which is—

I hardly, I hardly ever talk to students. It's so ingrained in people that the suspicion of profitability is so ingrained that I always have my, my sentences always add with profitably, because otherwise you might misunderstand what I'm talking about. Profitability— this is one of my favorite topics to talk about— is if, if I, if I make this pen— so this is a nice Swiss pen, I just brought this back from Switzerland— and I buy this, the, the raw materials of this are probably $5, right?

Mm-hmm.

Even with everything, you know, cost, cost of goods sold, $10. I bought this for $50. The $40 that I, in a free market, pay for this, that is, I know where the $10 come from. Where did the $40 come from? The person over there in Switzerland created $40, new value that has never existed before. They didn't steal it from somebody else. They didn't move it around on their spreadsheet. They created this, in a sense, out of nothing with their human ingenuity. So, in a sense, if things were right, the Fed would now have to print $40 more, new dollars, to the value of our GDP because I bought this pen. In a free market, it works like this. And so, yes, you can call it profit. I would call it new value or new money because that is a gift that entrepreneurs give to society.

Big companies call it value creation, but what I've noticed in startup circles is The word profitability sometimes isn't that acceptable. So they're saying sustainability. And I'm like, okay, that's something different. Profitability. Yeah, that needs to be sustainable. So do other things. Your people, your demand.

And it's like, it's not— look, if I— my view on this, because sustainability is— I think it has an adage in there or an aspect in there. Well, it can't hurt others and so on. But let me tell you something. If you do business and you have to apologize or make up or give back after for it, you did business the wrong way. When you do real business, I don't have to give back after, after I just create value. Real business people don't go and destroy the environment. Real business people don't pull people over the table and cheat them. Real business people don't cheat their employees. with, with, with unjustified or unjust wages. Let's, let's keep the main of the bell curve with the real business. If you want to come up with new names, call some people extortionists, call the, you know, but don't soil the name of the 99.9% entrepreneurs and business people in the United States who do good work every day.

Exactly. You know, I spend a lot of time— I don't know why, but talking to MBA students about not going in the trajectory where they want to go, either consulting or big companies. I talk them into, you need to work for startups, entrepreneurial. And if you don't want to go hog in right now, or whole hog, you could still keep your corporate job and with the power of and, you know, also be involved in a startup or an incubator or accelerator. How do we do that? I mean, I'm one person. So how do we as a society, even globally, just entice more people to be entrepreneurial, to try it, to get into it? They don't have to be the founder. They could just join.

No.

smaller companies. And, you know, when the economy's bad and they're seeing a lot of layoffs, they're like, well, it's probably smarter to go to a big company. So I'm like, no, it's not. It could be smarter to be with the smallest company.

So exactly, exactly.

There are arguments we can throw away, but the real question is, how do we entice, I guess, more?

So first of all, don't make decisions based on short-term revenue and say you go to the bigger company, get more money. Look, I started out without getting paid at all. We call it FTP software, stands for File Transfer protocol. We called it fun that pays. Like, if you send me on a trip once in a while, I'm happy to work for free because I love this so much.

Mm-hmm.

My, my, my, my idea there is to say, don't just look at the short term, look at your life overall, and start to say, what kind of experiences do you need and what your talents actually are? I have this fun little— it's not scientific or anything, but on my website, andreaswidmer.com, andreas-widmer.com, I have a little entrepreneurial quiz you can take just for fun.

I have the same.

That basically shows you, because what I'm driving at is to say, look at what you have, the assets you have. How do you behave? What kind of risk do you like? What kind of situations do you like? And maybe you'd be great at buying a franchise rather than doing startup entrepreneur, or do a search fund. There's also an entrepreneur, or go into a larger company, or be an employee entrepreneur, or Or do a startup.

So many avenues.

And maybe you don't want to start off, you know, maybe in the middle of having a family or something, maybe a startup is not the best idea. And you might want to go with a more established thing. And it depends on the seasons of life as well. And so, I think it's what the biggest issue we have is that people don't look at their whole life. People go into a career and they just want to do one big hit and then be done. No, no, no, that's a very bad understanding of work. Like, if you imagine if you would stop working, you would start to get depressed and burnt. Talk about burned out when you work. Try not working. You're going to burn out much more. And so I want to look at the whole life and say, if I'm doing this, you know, for 60 years, What kind of work am I going to get engaged in? And keeping that perspective, I think, is a very important thing that will then entice people to make different decisions than saying, I'm just going to swing for the fences and then I'm done.

Yeah. And I like your idea of giving them an option menu because usually when I say, hey, you should be an entrepreneur or do it on the side, keep your day job. But if they could look at a list of things, so I know a couple People who are, what do we say in the States, gazillionaires now, because he started out with one Wendy's franchise, now he has 50. And he took a risk. He was working at a corporate job somewhere.

And I love your spin on that, that you could do so many things.

You don't have to start a tech company anymore.

No, franchises, for example, have a very high level of success. And you don't, you know, you don't have to take Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's, the most high-priced kind of franchises. Um, somebody actually endorsed the book is a friend of mine, Dina Dwyer, from the Dwyer Group. They are now acquired by a larger group, but they have all kinds of franchises. And I'm telling you, when you go into that business, you see tons of opportunities. And these are proven business models. You go in and then you can basically The entrepreneurial function in there is then customer generation rather than— you don't have to worry about the backend because they figured that out.

No, it's all marketing. Yep.

You basically do hire and customer generation, and that's a tall enough order, but that's maybe a good way to start.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely helps the monthly dividends.

Yeah.

So Andreas, really, I want to thank you for joining us today. I normally ask for some kind of a story on the Going out, but do you, I mean, so at Catholic University, you probably get a lot of CEOs coming in to visit and corporate ones too. What kind of advice would you give them? Many of them listen into the podcast about how to be smarter, more entrepreneurial in the 2020s.

Look, they always talk about how we humans with AI and everything are gonna be replaced with work and everything. Take my word for it, that's not gonna happen. Mundane tasks, tasks that don't need the human genius might move away, which is okay because it's also deafening, mind-numbing kind of jobs that go away. But in the future, what's more and more needed is the human genius, the human creativity, the human difference, the human advantage in a sense. And we make a huge mistake by investing in technology And having plans, technology plans, and all that, and taking risks and looking at the ROI of our investments in these different things and ignoring the fact that the only investment with infinite return, with infinite ROI, is the human person. And so, what I need you to do is to look around your company and start to identify who is around you and what are their talents and how do you bring those talents Not to go and criticize and say, well, you suck at this or you suck at that. Start by looking at what they're good at and then start to see if that's your raw material. How could you invest in them to become even better at what they're good at already? And because that's the path to the human genius.

Yeah.

And I'm telling you, that's the best money you can spend in your company.

Love it. Great advice. Thank you. You've been listening to Andreas Widmer. He is running the Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America's Bush School of Business and Economics. Great place. Check out his new book, just came out. In addition to The Pope and the CEO, check out his, his other book, The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. It's Dean Dobias with the Reboot Chronicles. Want to thank you for joining us today, and we will see you soon.

Bye-bye.