Excerpts from an interview with Charles Brewer. Brewer incorporated MindSpring Enterprises Feb. 24, 1994, and resigned in August 2000, after his company merged with California-based EarthLink.

After discussing the progress his new, smart-growth minded development company, Greenstreet Properties, is making, Brewer, discussed on his former company.

In your mind, are the core values and beliefs still in effect at EarthLink?

I'm so out of touch I don't really know the answer to that. I'm not even sure how many former MindSpring folks are around. But I know that there are people present for whom [the core values and beliefs] really resonates and for whom they are important. How much it's really a real live thing in everyday life company-wide, I really don't know. I mean, I don't think that it's the way it once was. But I'd only be speculating. I try not to pry.

At the time, did you think the core values and beliefs would survive the melding of the two cultures?

Yeah, I did. When we merged, I was planning on being there a long time. My role ended up being a frustrated one. It just wasn't a good job for me. I did have some disagreements with the rest of management, both about strategic things and values kinds of things. But I didn't have power [laughs]. I was trying to be persuasive but I wasn't being as persuasive as I would have liked. And short of some sort of World War III, there wasn't much I could really do about it. So it was uncomfortable to have that sort of diverging disagreements.

You set out to create a new kind of company, and you did. How does it feel to look at your old company now?

I don't have the sense that any of the objectives and what they are shooting for are the same as it was back in the MindSpring days. But we had some pretty unusual objectives [laughs], but I guess that's to be expected. It's nothing I have any right to complain about or comment about ...

At MindSpring, I didn't care that much what the line of business was. It was kind of a great irony that our line of business ended up being this big phenom. It was really all about to me the values and philosophies. It was secondary what the line of business was.

MindSpring was getting to be a pretty big company. In the beginning, I set out to be small businessperson/entrepreneur. I think it was natural along the way to question, "Am I really the right guy for this job anymore? As it got to be 1,000 and 2,000 employees, and more?" And at some point, [the answers became that I] probably was not the right guy for running a very, very large corporation, just given my talents and interests and everything.

One thing I guess I miss is I really do think there is something to be demonstrated about the power of really following through with the kind of philosophy that we had as our foundation at MindSpring. The theory behind that for me was always that, if you could really create a place to work that avoided a lot of the usual pitfalls of organizational life, and where people really could feel engaged and proud about what they were doing, and contribute with their whole self, everybody would end up being not just a little more productive and more effective than elsewhere, but really dramatically so. And I still think that's true.

Somehow someway I'd like to see that experiment undertaken again.

Do you think it would work? Do you think a big company can cut it in this hyper-competitive day and age using beliefs like those you came up with?

Yeah, you know, I do. I don't think there's a problem of scaling it up with that values based way of doing things. Even with our particular philosophy at MindSpring, which was sort of a unique one, I don't think there's necessarily a problem in scaling that up from small to big. The key thing is that everybody is on board and leading on that, then it scales up forever. And I think we really saw that pretty clearly at MindSpring, because by the time we were up to a couple thousand people, there was a lot of opportunity to lose that through scale and I don't think that that had happened. I think the beliefs were pretty firmly in place as of merger time.