standards (at Kering, he was known as the “sustain- 146
ability Taliban”), and has learned that good ideas
can easily founder on the reality of supply chains.
“You have to get your hands really dirty,” he says.
“We can theorise a lot of things, but to see the
impact, especially far down the supply chain, you
have to see the real impact on the ground. It’s that
that tells you if something’s working or not.”
Fourteen years ago, he decided to put his ideas
into practice by starting his own business – Segera,
a 50,000-acre luxury holiday retreat on the Laikipia
plateau in Kenya’s central highlands. “I felt you can’t
preach what you don’t live,” he says. Kenya was
where Zeitz found his mission. Growing up watching
the natural history documentaries of Bernhard
Grzimek – the “German David Attenborough” – he
was fascinated by Africa, and in November 1989
went on a budget safari to Kenya and Nigeria.It wasn’t all he had hoped for; he remembers being
taken to see a lion and finding 30 other minibuses
full of people. He saw the environmental impacts of
business and mass tourism, and felt his perspective
changing. In the evening, he watched footage of the
fall of the Berlin Wall back in Germany, but he felt
more of a connection to his present surroundings.
“I just fell totally in love with the continent,” he
says, “and I knew I wanted to make it my home.”
He now spends about three months of the year
at Segera, a former cattle ranch run down by a
previous owner, who went bankrupt. Its soil fertility
had been reduced by overgrazing, there was little
relationship with local communities, and poaching
for meat and fur was common; in his first year, Zeitz
would often find the bodies of giraffe, buffalo and
elephant that had been shot and trapped.
At the time he set up Segera, he also created his
philanthropic Zeitz Foundation. He and Segera
manager Benaiah Odhiambo set to work creating a
business framework by making baseline studies of
the community and the environment, and talking
to zoologists, conservationists and local people
with knowledge of the land. He brainstormed the
“4C” concept of conservation, community, culture
and commerce. “The secret is to create wins foreverybody,” Zeitz says. “You can’t just
preserve the environment by putting
a big fence around the property and
casting the community aside, because
you need the community to sustain the
property. You need culture because
cultural shifts help to transform people’s
mindsets. Commerce is the driver
of everything because you can’t run
something on philanthropy forever.”
Using the 4C plan as a framework,
Zeitz and Odhiambo developed five-year
goals. The fruit of all that planning is
now evident: the central part of Segera
consists of a ten-acre circle of grass in
the brushland, with eight guest cottages
(costing up to $2,400 a night) on stilts,
interspersed with open-air baths, cacti
and contemporary African art, and a
water recycling plant; the land has been
re-wilded and is again home to giraffes,
elephants, impala and other game;
and local people graze their animals
there on a rotational basis. Writers
and activists have praised the depth
of Segera’s engagement with the local
community – although at the beginning,
Zeitz’s team were unpopular, because
they weren’t, as one director told the
Financial Times, “doing the conventional
thing of throwing sweets over the fence”.
The complex employs 240 people,
and has opened up access to markets for
other businesses such as bead-makers
and food producers. The Zeitz
Foundation has collaborated with aid
agencies to build local “climate-smart”
schools that drain rain runoff into tanks,
where it can be filtered to make clean
drinking water. One of the most inter-
esting initiatives is an anti-poaching
unit staffed entirely by local women.
“They are tough ladies, and fully trained,
but the idea is to get them to commu-
nicate what we are doing at Segera to
help the communities, and to explain
that preserving the wildlife is more of
an opportunity than exploiting it.”
Zeitz has launched other projects in
Africa: the Zeitz Collection of contem-
porary art from Africa and its diaspora;
the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art
Africa, a complex of 100 galleries in a
1920s granary in Cape Town converted
by Thomas Heatherwick; and The Long
Run, which rates sustainable tourism
projects according to the four Cs.A great deal of Zeitz’s work now
involves supporting businesses that
have realised they need to transform,
but lack the confidence. Jean Oelwang,
a senior B Team partner and president
of Virgin Unite, the Virgin Group’s entre-
preneurial foundation, says leadership is
the most important commodity for The
B Team: it was set up “partly because
when the founders started to think
about the need for change, they saw
that leadership was what was scarce”.
Business leadership works differ-
ently during a transformation, because,
Zeitz says, bosses are less able to rely
on practices that previously insulated
them from criticism. He points to market
research. “Traditional consumer goods
companies are very research driven,
and don’t really decide on action until
research tells them to change – but the
reality is that research doesn’t always
tell you what the consumer wants,
because you ask the consumer, and then
the product comes out two years later.
“If you’re evolving slowly but surely, it
works well, but if you’re trying to change
you need a different approach, especially
in today’s world with technology, where
everything can change so much more
quickly than it used to, and entry barriers
to markets are lower in terms of costs.
Nowadays you need to think more about
using a product to create a new demand,
not satisfy an existing one.”
That’s what he did at Puma, where the
research told him “to just give up, as the
company had no future”. It’s easier now,
he says, because VCs and private equity
are more willing to back entrepreneurs,
though there is also more pressure on
CEOs, because they are increasingly
required to act ethically as well as
ensure the health of the company. This
expectation is a key part of The B Team’s
premise. Its leaders believe that organi-Right: Ester Emaret, a member of
the SATUBO women’s beading group,
which is supported by the Zeitz
Foundation and the Segera reserve
Below: the main compound and
accommodation for reserve visitors11-19-FTJochen.indd 146 17/09/2019 13:25