When we think of the integration of faith and business, St. Maximilian Kolbe may not sound like the most immediate saint to reference. Yet he was one of the entrepreneurial saints the Church has known. In fact there is a group in Poland seeking to get St. Maximilian approved as the patron saint of start-ups and entrepreneurs. We have chosen this as our first post both to honor his accomplishments but also because he is specifically one of the saints we are seeking intercession for the success of the Catholic Curator and its members.
If ever there was a man worthy of the monikers "renaissance man" and "entrepreneur" it was him. While our title is intentionally proactive, it is not a stretch at all when we look at what this incredible saint achieved in business, faith, charity, international scaling, and in science. Here are literally just highlights of the incredible abilities and accomplishments of this saint and martyr.
Intellectual Giant:
+Kolbe was brilliant, completing two doctorates, along with continued studies in physics, astronomy, and mathematics.
+While pursuing the priesthood, at the age of only 24, he had designed and submitted an idea for a spacecraft to a scientific journal.
Marketing and Branding visionary:
+ Launched a publishing company in 1922 with no experience.
+ With no marketing budget, no digital media and no experience, grew the monthly circulation of his paper, Knight of Immaculata, to 750,000.
+ He might have been the first to try a "fremium" model to market the paper. There was no cost for the paper, only a suggested
donation. This proved successful enough to fund much of his growth.
+ Grew his publishing to include almost a million other print pieces per year.
Technology Evangelist:
+He was a huge advocate of using technology and was quoted as saying “If Jesus or St. Francis were alive now, they’d use modern technology to reach the people.”
+ He worked on inventions for voice recording and transmission.
+ He built the first Catholic radio station in Poland, Radio Niepokalanow.
Human Resources Pioneer:
+ He was an incredibly successful recruiter. He grew his organization to 700 people and become the largest Catholic monastery in the world.
+ St. Maximilian was an astute manager of people and knew how to fully integrate work, prayer and rest. He created a vacation policy requiring every priest to take two weeks of vacation every year.
+ He built a dedicated facility that allowed for rest, recreation and maintaining prayer and faith life while on vacation.
+ He was way ahead of his team in creating offsite team building activities.
Extraordinary Community Supporter:
+ He saw a need for firefighters in Poland so he developed a fire-fighting training program and a created a brigade of fire-fighting friars.
Global Expansion:
+He created a monastery and publishing company in Nagasaki, Japan.
+ When the atomic bomb was dropped there, the monastery building was miraculously spared from destruction, while almost everything around it was leveled.
Martyr and Saint:
St. Maximilian accomplished all of this by the time he was 47. His life was cut short by the Nazi's who imprisoned him in Auschwitz. There Kolbe would achieve his greatest accomplishment of all. He would offer his life to the take the place of a family man who was about to be executed.
Here's to St. Maximilian Kolbe - entrepreneur, marketing genius, HR pioneer, inventor, publisher, radio station creator, space travel visionary, fire-fighter, international missionary, martyr, and Saint. Thanks be to God for his witness to fully integrating faith and his gifts, to achieve incredible levels of success and service.
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