144PHOTOGRAPHY THIS PAGE: JOSHUA KURPINSsustainable in a way that improves both
society and the natural environment, and
that creates economic growth. Sipping
water in a pub in south-west London,
where he keeps one of several homes,
Zeitz cuts a benign figure: bearded,
dressed in greenish cords and a T-shirt,
he sits next to an acoustic guitar he’s
brought with him. He looks more like
a 1970s singer-songwriter than an
influential business leader.
In soft, measured tones, Zeitz explains
how he sees business as moving from
an industrial revolution model based
on extraction to one based on the
regeneration of resources. “My belief
is that every company has an oppor-
tunity to innovate by creating business
solutions for services or products that
significantly reduce your impact and
create more demand for your product,”
he says. “Well, unless you are an
extracting business. In that case, you’re
a dinosaur and you’re dying.”
Central to Zeitz’s vision is redefining
the role of business in society in a
way that promotes sustainability
on all fronts: social, environmental
and financial. The new definition, he
says, needs “to create a kind of share-
holder value that is socially just and
environmentally sustainable. I believe
that creating shareholder value is
necessary because it creates jobs and
all the things that we need on a planet
with a rising population. But it can’t be
at the expense of everything.”
The solution is to marry sustaina-
bility with growth. “It’s a question of
what we grow and how we grow, and
how we can reduce our impact signifi-
cantly and still grow,” he says. “We have
to grow within planetary boundaries.”
In practice, this means that instead of
making short-term profits that may incur
costs later on (an obvious example being
depleted resources leading to higher
raw material prices, or social inequal-
ities reducing at-work performances andZeitz is a 56-year-old executive and
entrepreneur with a formidable set of
achievements to his name. In 1993, at
the age of 30, he became CEO of Puma- at the time, he was the youngest ever
CEO of a German company – and turned
the near-bankrupt business into one of
the world’s top three sports brands. The
company was acquired by the luxury
goods conglomerate Kering in 2007,
and a few years later Zeitz served as
Kering’s Chief Sustainability Officer.
He now sits on the boards of Harley-
Davidson, financial services company
Cranemere and the Kenya Wildlife
Service, as well as running his own chari-
table foundation and co-chairing The B
Team, a non-profit that he co-founded
with Richard Branson in 2012 to promote
sustainable business practices.
He has won the Financial Times
Strategist of the Year award three
times, been awarded the German Federal
Cross of Merit, and co-authored two
books – one of which, a dialogue with
Benedictine monk Anselm Grün called
The Manager and the Monk: A Discourse
on Prayer, Profit and Principles, has been
translated into 15 languages.
Across his many endeavours, Zeitz has
one overarching aim: making businesses
motorcycle dealership in downtown San
Francisco, on an autumn evening in 2011, a
group of automotive engineers and market
researchers stood staring at several unusu-
al-looking black-and-silver motorbikes.
The mystery vehicles were about to be put to
the test by a dozen motorcycle enthusiasts.
The bikes had no markings to show who had
manufactured them. More remarkably, they did
not have standard petrol engines but electric
motors, with panels where the cylinders should be.
This design element was a contentious choice for
the manufacturer, as the proximity of the rider to
a loud petrol engine is generally regarded as part
of a motorbike’s appeal. A researcher explained
that these were new electric vehicles, designed
for an authentic riding experience and not just
a short-hop urban commute. They invited each
person to take one of the models for a test ride.
After the ride, the researchers asked the testers
about the bikes; the feedback was positive. They
then wanted to know how the riders’ attitudes
would be affected by branding: would the bikes
seem more exciting and innovative if they were
made by, say, Honda or Tesla? As the researchers
ran down their list, the engineers held their
breath. Finally, the big question: what if they
were made by Harley-Davidson?
“They loved the idea,” says Harley-Davidson
CEO Matt Levatich, speaking from his Milwaukee
office eight years later. He still remembersthat in the report, one attendee had
actually exclaimed, “Wow!”
Levatich admits he had initially
been apprehensive, because “Harley
might well have been the last brand
in the world you would expect to go
electric”. However, the tests in San
Francisco (and, subsequently, Atlanta,
London, Berlin and Tokyo) revealed
that, provided the ride experience was
good enough, the brand had sufficient
strength to make electric seem not a
compromise, but an exciting innovation.
It would take eight years and the
work of a thousand engineers to fully
realise the product, but the Harley-
Davidson LiveWire, the company’s first
electric model, was finally due to go
on sale at $30,000 (£28,995 in the UK)
in September 2019. Levatich credits
the LiveWire with reviving optimism
about Harley’s future at a time when
motorcycle sales are in decline. It has
attracted generally favourable reviews
in the motorcycle media, and Levatich
says: “It made me think, ‘Look what this
brand can do. Look what this company
can do. Look what we could become.
We could transform things.’”
But Levatich is keen to share the
credit. Harley-Davidson fans shouldn’t
just thank him, he concedes. They
should also thank Jochen Zeitz.11-19-FTJochen.indd 144 13/09/2019 19:15