Harley-Davidson’s Entrepreneur and New Mastermind

Jochen Zeitz — Harley-Davidson interim President and CEO

The ultimate maverick has been hired to preserve and renew the freedom to ride.

I’m talking about Jochen Zeitz — the entrepreneur and new mastermind in charge of Harley-Davidson until he is offered the position permanently or a recruitment committee finds a replacement CEO.

So, what do we know and who is this man?

• Speaks seven languages — five spoken fluently including Swahili
• Has his own charitable foundation
• Owns unpublished Hemingway letters and collects robust amounts of African art.
• Owns a luxury tent-camp in Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve close to the confluence of the Sand and Keekorok Rivers
• A published author: one book is a dialogue with Benedictine monk Anselm Grün called The Manager and the Monk: A Discourse on Prayer, Profit and Principles
• Co-funded ‘The B Team‘ with Sir Richard Branson
• Awarded the Financial Times Strategist of the Year award — three times
• Honored by the fatherland and awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit
• Sits on the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) board
• Formed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Inside: Zeitz MOCAA)
• Founded ‘The Long Run,’ an organization that grades sustainable tourism projects
• Purchased a 50,000-acre Kenyan retreat — Segera Retreat Lodge — to develop a new type of tourism leveraging “the 4Cs”
• A pilot and travels across Kenya in his 1929 Gypsy Moth biplane that was used in the Oscar-winning movie, Out of Africa
• Wears t-shirts, no socks, meditates, likes to run and became a guitar virtuoso in 5-years — professional percussive technique

Jochen Zeitz at Segera Retreat Lodge

As a slacker who would debate a good life is better than a good job, paint me truly inspired for that list of accomplishments!

Talk about an extreme producer with a missionary zeal!  And, I haven’t mentioned the best part… a profile of his “day job” achievements.

Mr. Zeitz represents qualities too good to be true and the idea of him shilling for some corporation to hawk motorcycles deflates the “HERO” excitement.  It’s clear, Mr. Zeitz won’t be satisfied until he has done everything to promote his vision of a new, better world.

LiveWire — Jochen Zeitz — Milwaukee, WI

With his multi-millions in fortune, Jochen Zeitz is likely the richest person in history to run Harley-Davidson as interim president and CEO.

So, again, who is the 57-year old sandy-haired, 6’1’’ athletic build of a man?

Mr. Zeitz was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1963, to a gynecologist father and dentist mother.  He grew up in a time when the Green Party and the anti-nuclear movement were enjoying strong support in Germany.  Along with the time he spent at the family’s lodge in the Odenwald forest, the outdoor exposure planted seeds of interest in environmentalism.  He was educated at Karl-Friedrich Gymnasium, Mannheim, south-west Germany, and then international marketing and finance at the European Business School of Oestrich-Winkel near Wiesbaden.

Jochen Zeitz and wife Kate Garwood

Mr. Zeitz began his professional career with Colgate-Palmolive in Hamburg in 1986. He then moved to Herzogenaurach in the Franconian countryside to work for sporting goods manufacturer Puma (Bio) in 1988. From there, he rose rapidly though the ranks to become head of marketing in 1991 and vice president — international and head of the global marketing and sales department.  In 1993, at the age of 30, he became chairman of the board of Puma, making him the youngest CEO of German firms with commercially traded stock. He dramatically reduced staff numbers, took production to Asia, made English the corporate language, started sponsoring African football teams and was credited with turning around the near-bankrupt business into one of the world’s top three sports brands.

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) — Cape Town

In 2003, he insightfully signed 16-year-old future Olympic champion sprinter Usain Bolt to Puma.  In 2007, he was appointed to the Board of Harley-Davidson.

Puma was acquired by luxury goods conglomerate Kering in 2007, and a few years later Mr. Zeitz served as Kering’s Chief Sustainability Officer.  In 2011, he set up a sustainability committee for Harley-Davidson, which he also chaired.

Also in 2011, he wanted to step back and focus on his environmental work and resigned as CEO of Puma.  He became a director of parent company Kering and chairman of the group’s sustainability committee.  He co-founded ‘The B Team’ with Sir Richard Branson in 2013.  That same year he launched the Kenyan Segera Retreat with a focus on his foundation’s 4C philosophy for sustainable tourism.

In 2020, he was hungry for something much more and became Harley-Davidson’s interim president and CEO.

Jochen Zeitz — 1929 Gypsy Moth Airplane Photo credit: Eric M Rojas

On a personal level — he divorced his first wife Birgit Jöris in 2012 following an 18-year marriage.  He is currently married to LA-based producer Kate Garwood‚ 41‚ producer of the 2016 movie “Race”‚ about U.S. track star Jesse Owens.  They have two children; 4-year old Jesse born September 2017 and a three year old. He keeps homes in Switzerland, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, a 50,000-acre ranch in Kenya and has property in west London.

When researching material for this blog post, I was blown-away on the amount of information published about Mr. Zeitz.

In a 2013 interview with the International Bar Association, he stated no plans to marry again, although at the time he was in a long term relationship with Kate Garwood. He was adamant about no intention of having children. ‘No, definitely not,’ he stated emphatically. ‘Never say never, but it’s very unlikely. It’s not something that fits with my daily life and I’ve never believed that having children without a father around is a good idea. It’s not really something I would get excited about.’  Just a short four years later both occur.

Jochen Zeitz at Segera, his 50,000-acre ranch. Photo credit: David Crookes

In recent press interviews, he’s stated the joy of his decision to have children late in life, because now he can see them grow up versus having such a busy schedule in running a company and traveling for 10 months in a year.  An interesting side bar: Speculation swirled that Jesse, their first child, was named after the 1930s athlete and fueled by the fact that Jessie Owens was provided with shoes for the 1936 Olympics by the Dassler brothers‚ who went on to found Adidas and Puma. 

But, I’ve digressed and want to return to connecting the Harley-Davidson dots… Mr. Zeitz’s experience at Kering was a critical influence and the driving force behind Matt Levatich’s (the recently fired Harley-Davidson CEO) pivot to sustainability that led him to think much more about environmental profit and loss at Harley-Davidson.  Mr. Zeitz had devised an environmental profit-and-loss account method at Kering which, put a figure on what a company’s air pollution, land use, water use and carbon consumption cost the planet.

Jochen Zeitz’s Favorite Thing — A Scottish Bailey — Photo credit: Charlotte Haden

While Mr. Zeitz — wealthy, world-view philosophy, competitive, over-achiever and relatively young — has the luxury of carving out grandiose, acronym-fueled sustainable ‘visions’, that struggling businesses like Harley-Davidson, desperate to increase motorcycle sales, might find distracting or even an irritant.

We’ll have to read the biography when ex-CEO Levatich publishes the book, but as an outside observer, one distraction example is: it took eight years, millions of dollars and the work of over a thousand engineers to fully realize a product that few want — the Harley-Davidson LiveWire — the Milwaukee company’s first premium electric motorcycle to go on sale in September 2019.  As a long-serving Harley-Davidson board member, Mr. Zeitz convinced executive management to focus not just on the moral justification for electric engines, but on the needs of Harley-Davidson customers to have healthy natural landscapes in which to ride. The logic behind this claim, was that “what every rider loves about the ride – it’s the environment they’re riding in, isn’t it?”  Soon afterward, the marketing and brand alignment teams marched in unison to support sustainability as a major part of the brand.

Segera Retreat — Laikipia, Kenya

The result?  A new mission, twisting the brand’s historic celebration of freedom into a desire “to preserve and renew the freedom to ride” and TWELVE quarters of sales decline.  Along with a $2,152,500 million severance payment to Matt Levatich.

Mr. Zeitz believes and is on record, stating there is more to corporate life than the relentless pursuit of profit. Wait, what?!  Isn’t profit what got Matt Levatich fired?

I’ve watched “An Inconvenient Truth” and the sequel. The oceans are heating and the poles melting, but color me skeptical of environmental groups with sustainable-for profit-business interests.  We’re all too aware of what the world needs: another multi-millionaire telling others how to behave better once they have made their own fortune while flying private and choppering into a rich man’s playground.

Jochen Zeitz GQ Article — in German

The motor-head scholars, bankers, real estate agents, lawyers and fashion designers who gather not to drink cheap brew, but to sip $15 “born to be wild” martinis and straddle $40,000 motorcycles might pontificate on the value of sustainability, but I just don’t see grizzled leather-clad loyalists describing Harley-Davidson as the world’s most sustainable manufacture over a beer at the Sturgis rally.

But, sometimes there’s a man. I won’t say a hero – ’cause what’s a hero? – but sometimes there’s a man – and I’m talking about Jochen Zeitz here – sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for the time and place.

A man who will improve the brand that is unique, exciting and one that gives value to it’s riding customers.

But wait, there’s more… An incentive if he kicks a field goal… according to the company 8-K regulatory filing, the interim Harley-Davidson, CEO Jochen Zeitz, is eligible and will receive a $3 million bonus (in the form of restricted stock units (RSU’s)) that would vest one year after the grant date and become payable if his employment continues to the date of the installation of a new CEO.  That $3 million would come on top of the annual base salary of $2.5 million he is receiving now after taking over for Matt Levatich. I don’t think this will be too difficult since Mr. Zeitz has served on Harley-Davidson’s board since 2007.

UPDATED: April 17, 2020 — Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and sales impact, Harley-Davidson announced that its acting president and CEO Jochen Zeitz and the company’s board of directors would forgo any salary or cash compensations. As mentioned above, Zeitz currently has an annual base salary of $2.5 million.

Photos courtesy of Harley-Davidson, Jochen Zeitz, Twitter, Eric M Rojas, David Crookes, and Charlotte Haden

Information Source & References: IBA, Independent,Wired,Business Daily Africa, Milwaukee Business Journal, Adventure Rider, Infosys, Telegraph, Financial Times, Angama Blog

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