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 Deas, coming to you live from Raviv'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 SIOKA center for Principled Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America's Bush 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 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, know, personally guard now St. John Paul II. I mean, what a, 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 yeah, 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.

Yeah.

And I was not exactly the front light of our class. I was more on the tail light. And, 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 six. I have four older brothers. So I, you know, we were wrestling and stuff all the time and, 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, a very strongly run military.

It's like Green Beret training.

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.

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.

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 six nine.

You could definitely take me out, I think.

And I was, I was much lighter then, of course, but I was. I 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'm. I miss my family and everything. 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 the. 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 yes, that's, of course, 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. 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 into me, into his team. He checked up on me and said, how are you feeling? And so 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, and. And I started to love working for he. He always hated. He didn't ever want you to say, I work for you. He says, no, we work with each other. Like, nobody works for anybody. We work with each other. And so he really got engaged and I. 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. 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 two 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. That all went away. And 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.

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 could think of a few other people, but.

And then you went on.

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. I just think it's got some amazing lessons in it. But. So that's. Yeah, that's kind of where I was going. What do you. 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. 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. They. They sprout much later. I came to America because, you know, that's the other thing, Dean. I. 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, and she. She. 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.

Chicago woman. What's not to fall in love with.

Exactly. And I introduced her to him, and. And he's like, oh, that's a nice girl that you have there. And I just. I said, listen, I got to go. I'm going to. I'm going to 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. 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, and they had this. They told me that they had this product, this we're talking about 1989, 90. They had this product, they ported this UNIX protocol, 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 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, and, and lo and behold, it was FTP software. And we, we were a rocket ship.

And 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, 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 in tech startups, is what is.

That's exactly what's happening. I'm looking for a boss to blame. And I'm the boss. Right? 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 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, 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 in the Sea answers. Because I, I went back to my drawing board and also back to him to bas. 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 he tell that, 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 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 were already working, you know, keep that passion alive. And I said, after all these years, I kind of bring three 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 two 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, 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 most recent one anyway, the Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. And I think you touch on some of those concepts in your own format. What, how do you, how do you teach people or help people? I guess through the book, but also at the university, you know, I'd love to find the right thing to do, I guess is the right question.

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

It's exactly the art of principled entrepreneurship. Yeah, that'd be great.

That's exactly, Dean, what you just talked about, the meaning of the, this, this Venn diagram and everything. And, 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. He built 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, high French wine, but I mean mass product table wine. That, that, 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 principal 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 thank you for asking me, but I have good news and bad news in the answer. And I said, well, hit me with the bad news first. And he Sundays, I have three months to live. The cancer came back. The doctor said he can't help me, I'm going to be dead in three 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. 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 three months, actually, he didn't die in three months, he died in two years. 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 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 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 three days before it went to print, which is. He died on December 18.

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, what's the goal of the center? You know, principle.

You know, there's something that creeped into the American psyche over the last 20 or 30 years and it's not good.

Yeah. That it's.

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. 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 it, can live this American dream. That every time I create something as an entrepreneur, I actually don't take value from somebody else. 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 a 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, 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 is 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, being. To me, it's a bit like the finance industry. It's an ancillary. Ancillary. I don't know if I use 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, it should turbocharge.

Exactly.

And it's not the core and it's not the end all, be all, but it's a, 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, if you look around, you'd never see, think this, but we have few, like almost 60% fewer entrepreneurs today than we had in the 70s. And, and there's that. That is like the canary in the goal in the coal mine. Is that how you say it? That if that goes away, if we're starting and we, we are going on the 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. 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, I'm.

Not like everyone says they're entrepreneurial now because they took a class or a semi.

So there's a difference there. I don't mind people calling themselves entrepreneurial. That's perfectly fine. I, 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 put 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 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 what, people willing to pay the right price for it. And you can actually build a financial return.

Yeah.

Versus an entrepreneur can actually dabble in all three of those. But the ones that are successful, 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 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 raw materials of this are probably five bucks, right? Even with everything, you know, cost, cost of goods, sold 10 bucks. I bought this for 50 bucks. 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. 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 dollars 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'. 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 people.

It's like, it's not look, if I, my view on this, because sustainability is, I think it has a, it has an adage in there or an aspect in there. Well, it has, 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 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, 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, the Name of the 99.9 entrepreneurs and business people in the United States who do good work every day.

Exactly. You know, I spent 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, if you don't want to go Hogan right now or whole hog is, you could still keep your corporate job and with the power of, and you know, also be involved in a startup or an incubator accelerator. How do we get, 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 smaller companies and you know, and when the economy's bad and they're seeing a lot of layoffs, they're like, well, it's probably more smarter to go with big companies. I'm like, no, it's not. It could be smarter to be with the smallest company. So.

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 called, you know, FTP software stands for file transport protocol. We call the 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. 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 a scientific or anything, but on my website, andreas widmer.com andreas-widmer.com I have a little entrepreneurial quiz you can take just for fun 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. And so many show and, and maybe, maybe you don't want to start off, you know, maybe the middle of having a family or something. Maybe a startup is not the best idea and you, you might want to go with the more establishing 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 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, you know, Wendy's franchise, Now he has 50 and he took a risk. He was, he was working at a corporate job somewhere.

And, and, and I love your can.

Do so many things. You don't have to start a tech company anymore.

No. And it's franchises, for example, have a very high, 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. 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 back end because they figured that out.

No, it's all marketing.

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.

Yep.

So, Andres, really 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 2000s.

Look, they always talk about how, how we humans with AI and everything are going to be replaced with work and everything. Take my word for it, that's not going to 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 the 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? Because that's the path to the human genius. 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 principal of the center for Principal and Entrepreneurship at Cath University of America's Bush School of Business and Economics. Great place. Check out his new book just came out. In addition to the Hope and the CEO, check out his other book, the Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. It's Dean Dubias with the Reboot. Congolese want to thank you for joining us today and we will see you soon.