4/03/2006

Interview with a Mennonite Entrepreneur

The San Francisco Chronicle's website, www.sfgate.com, today in the "Finding My Religion" column has a fascinating interview with Shawn Riegsecker, a tech company CEO who was raised as a Mennonite: "In the high-flying world of Internet entrepreneurs, Shawn Riegsecker is an unlikely success story. Born into a strict Mennonite family in a small Ohio farming town, Riegsecker was taught to view technology cautiously."

One highlight:

Q: You've incorporated those same values into your company manifesto, which you give to all new employees and business partners. What was the idea behind that?

A: I think one of the biggest mistakes we ever made as a country was that we took religion out of the schools and didn't replace it with any values and principles. I think the same thing has happened in corporate America. You can't bring up religion inside of a corporate setting, and in staying so far away from it we fail to inject any sense of principle -- right types of living -- into our work.

I've taken the principles that my upbringing and religion taught me and put them into a structured document.

Full post here.

1 comment:

Robin M. said...

Very nice. I keep wondering when one of us is going to volunteer to be interviewed for this column about being a Quaker in the modern world.

I especially agree with Riegsecker about the lack of religion in schools. I think it is a shame that we are unable to address the spiritual nature of human beings in public schools because of so much Christian malpractice over the years.