So Andreas has an amazing background and a wonderful story, a personal story. And I want to start with that just because sometimes you think this is this wonderful, you know, person at the university. He's so educated and smart and that's true, but he's also a person like you and me and he has a past. And so, when he was younger, you had a unique role as a Swiss Guard. You want to talk about that? How did you find your way there?
Twists and turns for all the wrong reasons. I come from Switzerland. Has anybody been to Switzerland? Small country and we have a military militia. Everybody goes. That was the first thing I was really good at in my life. I grew up in a small village, 400 people. The first thing I was not good at school. The first thing I succeeded at was the military. And I heard that I could become a bodyguard. And I thought that is the coolest thing to do. And so I signed up. And then I learned I would have to protect the Pope. And I thought, I don't have anything against the Pope. So I did that. And I didn't really have a faith. I'm culturally Catholic. And I joined and I ended up going through the trick is that I went through a recruit school and as soon as the door closed, the Swiss Guards is a foreign legion. You sign up almost like with blood. You're there for two years. You're not going anywhere.
As soon as the doors closed, I was like, this was much harder than I thought. It's an elite unit, right? And I wanted to leave right away. And I was totally distressed about having made a huge mistake. And I met John Paul II in that setting because when you protect somebody, you're next to them all the time. And he noticed my being distraught and started to tell me that he looked forward to work with me and that he thought highly of me and that he would start to pray for me. And I consider that to be the pivotal point in my life because having met him changed me inside out. I mean it changed my whole trajectory and through him then and that's one of the core parts of my life. He actually introduced me to Jesus Christ and I started to become a practicing Christian, a practicing Catholic. And I served him for two years in the Vatican.
Well, there you go. Now, how many people would have thought that that Andreas with the background that you may have read would have been in that situation. And if you're going to have somebody who talks to you about faith and leads you to the Lord, I'm thinking the Pope's probably pretty good.
Did he do all right or there?
And I don't know, maybe ask Father Shereo how he did it. Maybe you can give him some pointers. There's a few other pastors here that can go that way. But I think it's important for everybody to kind of have that background because it sparked in you that next thing for you. You wrote a book called The Pope and the CEO. You went from there. We're talking about your educational work right now, but you went into business.
Yeah. So, what I have to say about being a bodyguard, the cool thing is you see everything. I was then there with Reagan. I was there in the late 80s right at the end of the height of the cold war and I was there when Reagan was there. Can you imagine? I was there in the room when Reagan and John Paul met, or not in that room but outside of that room when like two days before he said Mr. Gorbachov tear down this wall. I was there. There's pictures and it's just an incredible time. And one of the benefits, before you think differently, it's not like John Paul was my best friend and I sat and had beer with him all the time. Although I did once. But I heard everything he said all day. Like you end up you're there. You might as well listen. And he profoundly shaped my understanding of the world and my view of the world. And you will see later on in our discussion he shaped the way I saw human anthropology, who we are, a bit what like Father talked about and then what my life was all about and who I am and that then propelled me to go and study.
When I started college some of these kids who were from MIT said hey we have this company and this is 1989 right, we have this company and we do software and everything. I'm like I've never even used a computer in my life, you know, I'm a military guy and it's never used a computer and they're like well we have all these foreigners call why don't you come join us and deal with all of the foreigners. Early on I was like number 45 or something like that in the company. That's the company who brought the internet to the PC that was called FTP Software. It took off like a rocket and I still go to college and I go to work early in the morning and work in the evening and they're like well we can't pay you we give you some shares which meant nothing to me. And then I graduate in 1993 and we go public in 1993 and then that was very good.
Then it meant something to you.
Yeah. And that's the day I learned what options mean. But then something changed. We used to call FTP, it means file transfer protocol, but we used to call it fund and pace because we all, you know, I got in there through my talent and we'll talk about this a little later but we were so literally complimentary with each other meaning that we completed, you know, we covered for each other's weaknesses or we magnified each other's strengths as a team. And as soon as we went public and the analysts showed up and everything, this all went out the window and it wasn't fun that pace anymore. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. And I left.
I met a couple, Jim and Janet Baker, who said, hey, can you help us do what you did with FTP? And they were the inventors of speech recognition. And this is again in Boston, again with MIT. And that was called Dragon Systems. And anybody uses any speech recognition, that's what this is. And I joined them in '95 I think and then by 2000 it was again as a rocket ship like you invent speech recognition, that thing just, I always say it's like the furniture shakes, but with this kind of growth we sold the company in 2000 for $600 million and I owned a chunk of this.
And I just want to put this in as context that so my girlfriend, my now wife is like let's just quit because, you know, we had nothing coming from Italy and now we live the American dream and everything and let's just go to Vermont and have some goats or something. That's always her dream, right? Doesn't your wife have that dream? So we go and I'm like, no, no, no. This you don't understand. This is going to get much bigger and much better. And so I stay all-in with this company that we sold to. And three months later, it turned out that this company was fraudulent and $600 million go from one second to the next to zero. It's a lot more than 600 because they collapsed and they were taken off NASDAQ and all that. It was a Belgian company.
That's people always ask say, what do you do when you lose that kind of money? I didn't lose $600 million, but I lost a lot of money. Well first you go in the fetal position under your desk right, no, grace of God. So I started to say can I be, is this true but this is what people say about capitalism that these are sorry greedy bastards and they're cheating and they're lying and everything and is that true? Can I be a Christian capitalist? That's what I asked myself because look at the end of the day I still, God is good. I wasn't like losing my shirt here, okay? Like I was still well.
And I decided two things. I was too old thinking to go back to school because I actually don't have an MBA guys and I don't have a doctorate. I'm not an academic, right? But what I decided is let me go find, I need to find a way of understanding. Maybe because I did this right out of college, maybe there's some things in business that I don't understand. And so I joined the Harvard Business School consulting firm called Monitor Group and I led their what they call country competitiveness division and I spun that out of Monitor. And that's like Michael Porter and everything with business strategy, how do you use business strategy especially in emerging markets but in general. And I felt like let me do this and actually my ulterior motive is to learn, you know, maybe I'm missing something.
And on the other hand what I did is I needed to go back into my Bible and into my church to say can I be, I need to know if I can be a Christian capitalist or not because if this is reconciled with my Christianity, I can't do it.
And that's why I started to study, I didn't want to study theology. I wanted to study ministry because I want to bring Christ into my business, into my daily work. And so I studied ministry, that's my master's degree. And the synthesis of these years of running this strategy company, doing my master's degree and thinking about what happened is a book that I wrote. Well, I wrote basically a letter to myself saying what I learned. Of course, John Paul kept coming back with these ideas and he was still alive. And I wrote these 10 things that I learned. And the conclusion is I can be a Christian capitalist, depend what you mean by capitalism, but I can do that. And people loved my list so much so that eventually it turned into a book. And that's the book The Pope and the CEO that you referred to. That's right. Long story.
Well, thank you for sharing that. And I think it's important and I wanted to go through that because, you know, as we come at this, there's a lot of things that come together, right? There's a lot of different pieces that come together. We're all from different backgrounds and certainly the faith community. And you get to the questions of what's the right thing to do? You know, okay, we want to get results, but there's a moral element to this and there's a moral element to being creative and to being entrepreneurial. And sometimes being entrepreneurial means you make money. Other times it means you just created something different that's of use for somebody else. And so I want to explore a little bit. And I think Andreas is wonderfully uniquely positioned to have had these different experiences and then to be able to study it. So talk about the humanity or maybe the faith-based element of entrepreneurship. And you wrote another book that we'll get to in a little while that talks about principled entrepreneurship, but talk a little bit just about from a humanity perspective.
So I just share with you my view. Father Crico touched on this a bit. It's the basic Christian view I think of work. So business entrepreneurship, it's work. And have you ever thought of the fact that we're the only animal that can work like, and I'm not talking about getting ants out of a hole with a stick or something like that. I'm talking about antibiotics or speech recognition or something like that. Only we can do that. Why? Why don't animals invent? Because we are, if you read Genesis, we are the crowning of creation. That at the end, God said, let's do somebody in our image and likeness. But God doesn't exactly look like this. We're actually made just like the animals with the same clay and everything. But at the end, God who created all of this breathed the creator spirit into us humans and gave us the stewardship mandate. And that stewardship mandate doesn't just mean go and water the plants. It means continue creation and we call that work.
So we have this gift to participate with God to make something out of nothing. Just like God, we participate with God in this grace that we have and we call that work. So this is sort of an anthropological question right. So first of all we need to understand that that is what work is and like God we have the free will that we have a choice when we work to imitate God. What does God do every evening in Genesis? That was good. Good job. Good day. It was good.
Can you do that at the end of your day to say good job? Did you create goods that are truly good? Did you provide services that truly serve?
Because if you did, you just imitated God all day long because that's what God did. But you have a choice. You can also not do that. That's like when Pope Francis used to say what people were offended by like an economy that kills. There can be an economy that kills because of human misuse of human freedom. But when we all of us intentionally want to be imitating God like this. Well, what happens when you imitate somebody? If you imitate God all day long, what happens to you? You become a saint. Holy, holy, whole. Like all of you, that's the primary objective of work is to imitate God through your work to become like God, right, to rise above humanity in a sense, to above your soul animal nature into all that humans can be, right. And that's the core aspect of work and therefore that's the first thing.
But I want to say just something about profit right away. Did you ever think or notice that God never made anything that isn't profitable? There's not a plant, not a stone, not a universe. Everything, this is love is abundant. Love as a law grows. There's always extra. And we should also primarily use our work to create more, to use things so that it multiplies. There is a place for charity and we can talk about that. But primarily our daily work should be to participate in God's creativity to create surplus in a sense to make more out of less.
And it's so easy for us to kind of fall into the trap a little bit that when we talk about work, we connect it to a job or to a paycheck. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we limit the humanity of what we do. And we start to value work based on what job someone has, how much someone gets paid or something else rather than missing that anyone adding creativity or adding life in any aspect in any way has innate value as a person and in the content of the work that they do.
See this is exactly what I just explained to you. This, you hit the nail on the head. What ails us today folks, we have two-thirds of our economy employees are disengaged. They hate their job. They just want to get home in the evening. Why? These are not bad people. Our way of approaching our economy and our work only focuses on the outcome. Just very briefly you can look there's two extremes of how we approach business work, two sides of how we approach work. One is sort of the boiler room, the caricature of Friedman. You know, profit is good, greed is good, just go for it.
Was it Gordon Gecko? Wall Street was the movie. Yeah.
I feel for the guy who ran the other company that when we blew up and I honestly tell you, I love this man and I pray for him. He said, Andreas, nothing personal, it's just business. The last time I saw him after this thing blew up, he needs a conversion, like he doesn't know, right? Everything is personal. There's no such thing that is not personal. Everything is personal. So the one side is greed is good. The other side is then you could call it CSR, whatever you want to call it. It's this side of saying okay you can do business but then you have to give back. That also assumes that business is a bad thing, but then you have to get back. You can go do this bad thing, but then you have to give me something, right?
I object to both these things. Work in itself. Look, if you have to apologize for what you do all day long, you're doing something wrong. Like if I have to apologize for my business afterwards and make up, then I've just done business wrong. What we have to come back to, there's an alternative to this. We have to just, what I explained before, work itself has to be good. When I was with FTP remember, fund that pays, we all grew. The goal of work is human flourishing itself and then there is a surplus, right, that's the effect of work. But if work itself is not fulfilling, is not part of your path to holiness, we're doing it wrong. And we need to start to pay more attention to the actual work we're doing than only the outcome.
So I think that's a point for us to think through because we tend to step back. We tend to put everything in a bucket and we tend to put a monetary value on everything. And there's again a place for that in certain ways, but it's broader and it's bigger than that. So let me take it the next step and talk about entrepreneurship and talk about the book that you wrote with Choquet, principled entrepreneurship. But it starts with the idea that the economy is for people.
And it starts with this idea that the work we do really is for us as people before it's for us as income earners or anything along those lines.
So I wrote this book. I was very privileged to sit with a man who's a friend of both of ours in his last two years of his life. This is a man who has had one of the greatest careers in business in my opinion in the brick and mortar world. And he was sort of sharing with me his insights before he dies. And that's a very sensitive moment because he can speak the truth of what he actually thinks which was a great privilege for me. And so we talked about this and we came up with these five pillars of principled entrepreneurship. And remember I'm a mental models guy. So different consulting firms have different kind of approaches. So McKinsey makes charts out of everything but Monitor's is mental models. So I'm a big mental models person and so all of these five pillars are mental models. This is my influence and then I negotiate with Art.
Well and can I stop there for a second before you go but mental, think about that. It's how we think. It's our paradigm. It's how we view the world. And I think the subject that we're trying to get to here is to challenge how we think because what we think is certainly something that's come from our experiences, but we haven't experienced everything in the world. We haven't seen everything in the world. There's more to know. There's more to learn. And so when you talk about mental models, sometimes if we stay stuck in a mental model, we can limit ourselves and then limit the range of options that we have to add value.
We don't question our mental model. We think people say, oh, I have no faith or I don't believe. You believe plenty. You're just not aware of it. Like examine your beliefs. The first belief we need to understand is that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy. I know it sounds simple, but if you actually go into companies when they say, oh, this is for the firm, that drives me right away through the roof. There's no firm. There's just you and me there. It's like musical chairs. We know everybody. We just go to different companies at different times. Like the tech industry, everybody knows everybody, right? So this idea of the economy is for people, it gives you the idea of what to pay attention to first.
The primary objective is to create jobs that have high and rising wages and that create a bond between people in a very simple way. So I teach business at the university and I teach 230, I think this room is 230 freshmen right now in our school and I think the weirdest thing, so I'm again not an academic but they asked me to help them build the business school there and my first action at the business school is to say I think it's the weirdest thing that did you ever know that business school is the only thing you can study and graduate in without ever doing it.
Would you go to a doctor and say you're my first patient, right? But I've studied it.
We do this in business and I say no, no, no. If you come to study with me, we're going to start a business. And so I just this week, next week, we start 230 businesses with all the every freshman at the university at the business school starts a business. This is not difficult. And here's how I explain it. Because again, we're going too far, too fast, too complicated. Business is a very simple thing. The core question of business is how may I help you? How may I help you? Your company is a how may I help you company. So start with saying how may I help you? Then first you have to know yourself.
And that's the first step I go through with the students. You are made in the image, likeness, and likeness of God. You're unique. If you don't live up to your potential in the world in the history of humanity, nobody will ever be able to do it. You have specific talents. I always use my size. I'm 6 foot and a pretty big guy. I'm distinct from other people, but we are inside as distinct. And I didn't do anything for my size, right? Just God just gave it to me. I say there's inside talents you all have that you were just given. These are gifts. This is why we call it talents. Now know your talents and then say how can I create value for this other person with my talents.
This is the deeply Christian part. Now I become other directed and I say hey I have this ability like these people who make this great jazz music over there that they can now say well how am I going to play for you to make you happy with this that it actually ends up I create more value for you than it costs me to provide it and when I'm doing that I create new money we call it profit, I don't like the term, but it is new money right that you're creating on top of it and that's the surplus plus that through this loving action of creating value for you, I can actually create new money and make me and you better off. This is why I think it's such a deeply Christian activity if we put the human persons, me and you in the center. And that's what I mean that the economy is about the person, not the person for the economy.
And there's so many times when in the business situation where there's a win-lose relationship. You're against the competitor, right? You got to compete with them. Or there's somebody who's competing for your job and you've got to compete with them. Or there's somebody who's trying to raise money from the same donor that you're trying to raise money from. And we get all stuck in this mentality that there's not enough. And I would love to encourage us to think there's plenty. Oh yeah. Now there's on the other side I would say there's always financial resources around but they're trying to find the good ideas, the creative ideas, the amazing people that are thinking of something new and different and are doing exactly what Andreas is talking about, say how can I create more value in the marketplace, how can I create for something, how can I walk with somebody a little bit better, how can I help them achieve something more. And so that kind of goes into the second area of to be human is to create and to do that process.
That ability and this is the biggest thing I have to overcome with my students and I write about it in the book that it's just this really big negative in my opinion wrong perception in the world that money is a finite resource because if it's a finite resource you have to think about redistribution, if it's a finite resource you have to redistribute it otherwise there's no way to deal with this.
What I just explained to you by how we call it even making money. If I create value for you and it's more valuable to you than for me to create, you literally make new money. They literally have to print more money. So money in a sense is the one resource we have as much as we do business with each other we have that resource. That's why I'm saying that in this, if you create goods that are truly good, if you provide services that are truly good...
Truly serving, you imitate God and in a way expand His abundance by creating more and more. And money, by the way, is just transfer value because you can do all kinds of things with it. And I think that creativity is not only producing the money, it also produces me flourishing and you flourishing. Now, something about this creativity that I want to bring out as well is that I think business has three objectives, and these are concurrent objectives. The first objective of work is to be creative, like God is creative, and we can say it in a secular way. I mean creative in a way that is positive for humanity, right? You're not destructive, right? Creative, positive, creative. The second thing is because by being creative, humans become fully human. Imagine the time when you felt fully alive — it's not when you did the easiest thing in life, but it's when you did the difficult thing that made you more who you are, like to actually achieve your, lean into your talent, reach your potential. If that's so good for you, you owe it to your neighbor to want the same for them. And so you should create teams at work to find others who have talents that complement. It's very easy for me. I'm a thinker, a doer, I rally people, I can explain things. These are all my talents that God gave me. I just have it. But then I have some non-talents — don't give me accounting, don't give me details. I don't book flights because I will do them in the AM instead of PM because it's just two letters to me. And so I need somebody next to me who has the strength where I have the non-strength, and I have the strength where the next person has their non-strength. And if we do a group like that, that's fun, because then you start to excel in your very nature, and the group becomes more than the sum of its parts — that's the rocket ship experience. But it also becomes true friendship, the right kind of friendship at work, because it has respect of equality of everybody bringing to the work their full participation. And that's the second part of the objective of work. So the first is creative, the second is supportive — I need to support you in the development of your full humanity at work. And the third one is reward, because we are physical beings and we deserve a portion of the extra value that we create, be it in profit sharing or shares.
I think you learned that one.
Yeah. And but not only financial, but also social — like the reward of working in a beautiful place like this. And working in a beautiful place, you give psychological, emotional reward to everybody that you work with. I think when I work with companies I play with that to help them make this rewarding on all levels. And there's so many capitals, different capitals behind financial capital — spiritual capital, social capital, intellectual capital.
