The Pope & the CEO

by Andreas Widmer

  For two years, I lived and worked at the center of that spiritual and political drama. In the process I learned a great deal about the world, myself, and God.

  The saying goes that Swiss Guards either lose or find their faith in Rome. I found mine. It didn’t take long. Serving under John Paul II made it almost easy. He was remarkable: a scholar, an actor, an outdoorsman, a diplomat, but most of all, a strong, vibrant, loving follower of Christ. In everything he did, he bore witness to the One he served. He lived the Faith. It would have been very difficult not to be affected by that.

  But, while it didn’t take long for me to find my faith, it took much longer for me to figure out how to live that faith in the world. For over a decade, I struggled with how to integrate my personal faith and my professional life. I kept them separate. I paid for that, both in dollars and in currencies far more precious.

  My “American Dream”

  Michelle was a beautiful American girl studying in Rome and, for me, it was love at first sight. Any thoughts I’d had of the priesthood or long-term service in the Guards went right out of my head when I met her. With the help and guidance of my friend Father Peter Gori, an Augustinian priest who befriended me in Rome, I made the decision to leave the Guards and go to school in Massachusetts, where I could be near Michelle.

  So, in 1989, I moved to the U.S., began studying international business, and proposed to the girl of my dreams. We married soon after, with Father Peter presiding at our wedding. At first, the deal was that Michelle would work while I went to school. But that didn’t sit well with me for long. I was itching to be the provider, and at the beginning of my senior year in college, with Michelle’s encouragement, I accepted an unpaid internship at a small start-up technology company. The “unpaid” part of the internship made me hesitate before accepting the offer, but Michelle urged me to go for it, saying prophetically, “When they see what you can do, they’ll start to pay you.”

  She was right. Within a few weeks, the company welcomed me as its fifty-first employee.

  The Rise

  That was the summer of 1991, and the company was FTP Software. A few innovative undergraduates from MIT had started the company not long before with a great idea: Create a system that would translate Internet Protocol (IP) from large UNIX computers to desktop computers. Their work allowed PCs to access the Internet. We all know now what a huge deal that was, but at the time, I had very little grasp of what it would mean. Actually, I hardly knew how to use a computer.

  But I did know there was something special about this company. The atmosphere was electric. There was a common vision. Everyone was pulling in the same direction. That’s not to say that no conflicts or problems existed. They did. But we were all joined together by a common vision of making this new network called the Internet a reality. We all gave everything we had to the endeavor.

  My first couple of years there, I managed to juggle work and school. I would go to work very early, deal with the European clients via phone, then head off to classes for the remainder of the day. In the late afternoon, I returned to the office to work with the Asian clients. It was crazy, but I loved it. I loved it not only because I enjoyed the work, but also because the people I worked with and for appreciated my efforts and made no secret about that. I knew I was a valuable part of a team. Sometimes I made mistakes. I was young and learning as I went. But so was just about everyone else at FTP. The strategy was to learn quickly and take advantage of every opportunity to increase our responsibilities.

  The company grew rapidly. During those first few years, we doubled our revenues every year. I started traveling overseas during my school vacations to visit our resellers and customers in Europe. In 1993, I graduated from college and was named the Vice President of FTP’s European subsidiary. Around the same time, FTP went public. This was one of the first large high-tech IPOs in the early nineties, and I was right there in the midst of it, having gone from unpaid intern to vice president in three short years. I was, for all intents and purposes, living the American dream. I loved it.

  I continued loving it for at least another year. In 1994, FTP moved Michelle and me to Europe so that I could open the company’s offices in Munich, London, and Paris, hire new staff, and start production of our software in the Netherlands. Once there, my team and I evangelized the glories of the Internet across Europe, speaking at trade shows and conferences and giving interviews to television shows and newspapers.

  At the age of twenty-eight, I had over one hundred employees and managed over 100 million dollars in revenue. I flew first class, stayed at the best hotels, and lived in a luxury penthouse in Munich’s most exclusive neighborhood.

  I also worked seven days a week, 365 days a year, and I didn’t love it any more.

  The Fall

  It wasn’t just the hours at work that were doing me in. Sometime after going public, the culture in the company changed. We were experiencing some strong competition and were no longer growing at the same rate. That seemed logical to me since growth is measured in percentages and growing by 100, 50, or 25 percent is a lot easier to do when you’re growing from a smaller number. The larger that number gets, the harder it is to sustain the same rate of growth.

  I brought that up from time to time, and was not alone in seeing the sense behind it. But sense wasn’t the issue. Wall Street analysts’ expectations were. They were harsh taskmasters and that became the company’s “end-all and be-all”: Outperform the analysts’ expectations for the quarter. But every time we did, it grew harder to do again. The pressure on everyone went up. Employees worked in fear of being blamed for the company’s failure to meet unrealistic expectations, and innovation suffered as a result.

  At first, I bought into this new way of doing business. In pursuit of reaching my ever-mounting quarterly goals, I neglected every other responsibility in my life. I lived to work. When Christmas came, I considered it a special luxury to leave Munich and spend Christmas Eve with my family in Switzerland. The next morning, however, while the family gathered to celebrate, I was itching to leave so that I could focus on my quarter-end. When my nieces and nephews headed outside to enjoy a sunny day of sledding, I hit the road for Munich, convinced I was making the most responsible and productive decision.

  I was not, however, convinced for long. The culture of the company was turning poisonous. We were no longer a team working toward a common goal. We were rivals, playing against each other in a zero sum game. As the company’s product began losing its competitive edge to Windows 95, I decided I’d had enough.

  The Crash

  I left FTP in 1996 to join Dragon Systems. The company was set to release a revolutionary product that would allow people to talk to their computers in natural speech. They hired me a year before the product’s release to help them grow.

  Once again I found myself working for a company with a common vision and a common passion in an environment that encouraged innovation. The company had been founded by a husband and wife team who regarded the company as a kind of family. They knew how to encourage their employees, to make them feel that they mattered and were valued. Risk taking was rewarded and long-term strategic goals pursued. We thrived, both as individuals and as a company.

  On my 34th birthday, Dragon Systems was sold for over $600 million. I owned a small chunk of the stock, but enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about my next job or any job after that. At least, that’s what I thought.

  The key decision about the monetization of my shares came during a trip to Asia. Michelle and I were in Singapore when I received a call from the Human Resources Department. I was told that the trading window during which it was legal for executives to sell company shares was about to close. They wanted to know how many shares I wanted to sell. Confident in the company’s current direction, I started to say that I didn’t want to sell anything. But Michelle intervened and asked me to discuss the decision with her first. I hung up and curtly told her that I knew what I was doing: The company that had acqui
red us had great plans, and the stock price would soar in the next six to twelve months.

  Michelle had a different perspective.

  “How much money do we really need?” she asked me. “Look at how the price is dropping. I don’t have a good feeling about this. Let’s just sell what we have and leave this crazy up and down life. We already have more than enough to live on.”

  But I thought I knew better. So, to calm her down, I agreed to sell a “nest egg” worth of shares and hold on to the rest. I called HR back, made arrangements for the sale, then returned my focus to the trip and the business at hand.

  Two months later, a junior journalist from the Wall Street Journal found out that the company we sold Dragon Systems to was fraudulent. In another area of their business they misstated their earnings and hundreds of millions of dollars were unaccounted for. The article basically said they’d lied and cheated on a massive scale. The month after the story broke, the shares of the company were pulled off the market and the company was forced into bankruptcy, with its key managers going to jail.

  I was left with Michelle, the nest egg, and a whole lot of frustration.

  Back to the Beginning

  The months following news of the fraud were filled with anger, confusion, and resentment. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t just the money we’d lost. It was the fact that we’d lost it because of someone else’s criminal deception. They lied to our faces, and we believed them. Bitterness beckoned.

  Again and again I asked myself how this could have happened. One of the most prestigious accounting firms in the world had given them a clean bill of health. And now there was no recourse? We couldn’t fight back? I racked my brain trying to figure out what I could have done differently. I was there, at the very first meeting with them. Didn’t I feel strange about it? I did. So why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I act on my instincts?

  But there was nothing I could do to change history and nothing I could do to get the wrong righted. The courts couldn’t help us. Nobody could. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. I also spent a lot of time questioning the whole system of capitalism. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe I was wrong. I’d watched the drive for ever-increasing profits destroy two companies for which I’d cared deeply. Maybe the whole thing was corrupt from the start, doomed to always end this way. I felt stuck, mired in a hole of confusion and resentment, from which I couldn’t escape.

  One evening, in an effort to quell my gloomy thoughts, I turned on the television.

  The Spirituality of Work

  It was 2000, the Year of Jubilee, and the man I’d once served, John Paul II, was seen everywhere. There were so many events for the Jubilee, so many trips to places like the Holy Land, Fatima, and World Youth Day, that the pope had become a constant media presence. I started watching his appearances, finding equal parts distraction and consolation in them. Then, one day, after a Mass for the Jubilee of Workers, John Paul II gave me the answers for which I’d been searching.

  At the event, John Paul spoke of a “spirituality of work,” and called people to join together in building a society that respects man and his work.

  “Man is more valuable for what he is than what he has,” the pope declared. He then added, “Whatever is done for the sake of greater justice, wider fraternity, and a more human ordering of social relationships counts for more than any progress in the technical field.”

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  I couldn’t let go of those words. I turned them over and over in my mind. With each turn, I started to realize that it’s the person, every specific human person, who counts in business. Business exists for the person, not the person for the business. Profits help a business operate, but they’re not the end. Helping the human person is the end. If it weren’t for the human person, we wouldn’t be doing business in the first place.

  There was one more quote from that Jubilee year that I couldn’t forget: “In a special way the Council Fathers entrusted you with the mission ‘of seeking the Kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will.’”2

  Although he was quoting from a Vatican II document, when he said that, I felt like he was speaking to me personally, calling out to me across an ocean, and repeating much the same thing he’d said during our last meeting in that ceremonial room at the Vatican twelve years before.

  I decided to change my career trajectory and focus on business strategy and how that could help the poor. Maybe that industry provided more meaning than what I experienced in the business world of the West. Maybe I would find virtue there. Maybe that work would be intrinsically in line with my Christian faith.

  My New Strategy

  In 2001, I was hired to help the OTF Group, a burgeoning consulting firm that focused on business strategy in uncertain environments. While its parent company the Monitor Group focused on large multinational companies, OTF focused on small and midsize companies that faced unpredictable and frequent change. Given my experience in the software startup space, I was a good fit for them. Yet the focus on emerging markets provided me with new challenges.

  I traveled to our clients and met emerging market entrepreneurs in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. I noticed how similar they are to any entrepreneurs I worked with here in the United States. In my four years with OTF, our projects reached from Alabama to Afghanistan, from Ontario to Rwanda, from Jamaica to Macedonia and Saó Paolo to Gabon. Wherever there was poverty, and often right after violent conflict, we advised private sector companies and governments on how to develop competitive business strategies to help them participate effectively in the global economy. I don’t think I had ever felt more gratified in my work. Nor had I ever felt more convinced that my work, the work of my colleagues, and of our company was profoundly fulfilling and meaningful.

  The industry as a whole, however, left me disillusioned: most development organizations I met with focused more on finding their next tranche of funding than on having a lasting impact on the people they were supposed to serve. In their work, they inadvertently bred a culture of dependency and stagnation. The prevailing paradigm of these companies and the multilaterals who funded them said it was okay to help a very poor person, but not to help that person create wealth—that would be too much. Just subsistence, no more. Having the poor become wealthy would take them away as a funding source. It wasn’t said, but the actions clearly portrayed this thought. At the same time, these firms and NGOs patronize the poor. They determine what’s good for people and how they should live and behave. I often thought that I don’t have as much control over my own son’s life as some NGOs have over the lives of the people they supposedly help. I did not want to move further into that industry. Its shortcomings looked no different to me than the ones in the US business world I’d experienced. Just like them, they have a noble objective but on the way fall prey to selfish interests and corrupt values. I did not find the difference I was hoping for.

  I felt the pull to go back into a startup venture. I loved advising others on business strategy, but the pull was to go back into business myself. I left OTF, accepting a non-paid position as an executive in residence at Highland Capital Partners, a Boston-based venture capital company. That gave me a prime space to get to know many of the current startup projects in the area, and afforded me the opportunity to get involved with a few ventures. It was a wonderful combination of circumstances, time, and place.

  At the same time, I was asked by Sir John Templeton’s foundation to write a business plan for them to enter into the field of enterprise-based solutions to poverty—the space that we promoted so heavily at OTF. I felt that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One of the world’s most prolific philanthropists asking me to help define a strategy to promote what I learned as a participant in emerging and innovative companies, asking me to help promote the lessons learned and best practices found during our work at OTF, and to integrate it all into a mind-set of human dignity and
faith. Unbelievable!

  Beginning to See the Light

  I worked on two tracks—one with new ventures and the other with the Templeton Foundation on their new strategy. I knew that eventually one of them would demand a full time commitment, but I did not know which one I was meant to pursue. This time, I wanted to make my decision consciously. I wanted to do God’s will, not my own. It was a two-year long process of discernment. I won’t tell you here that it was an easy time. It wasn’t. Discernment is difficult and uncomfortable. Though I’m looking for a “yes” to something, that “yes” entails a “no” to many other alternatives, and saying no to an opportunity is always difficult.

  One and a half years after leaving OTF, the delivery of my plan to Templeton and the final Highland Capital presentations coincided. I was waiting for answers and reactions from both over the holidays of 2007.

  I prayed that God would please close the doors he didn’t want me to enter—to please be clear about it. He was. I tried to get my most promising start-up funded, but to no avail. After innumerable presentations and travels across the nation, it was clear that the venture community felt we did not have a compelling solution for them. We decided to change our strategy and pursue army research funding, a direction that did not require or justify my involvement. It hurt to see that door close.