CNBC Business | THE GREEN MAN OF THE WOODS

THE GREEN MAN OF THE WOODS

How does Eckhart Wintzen combine making money with saving the planet?

As passionate about saving the planet as he is about succeeding in business, Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen explains how he reconciles the two. By JOE FIGUEIREDO

With his studentish clothes and hippie-length grey hair and beard, Eckart Wintzen does not look like a conventional businessman. But then Ex'tent, 'the company with a conscience' he created 10 years ago, is not a conventional business. The fact that it is headquartered in Austerlitz, a particularly leafy band of greenbelt that surrounds the Dutch province of Utrecht, is a bit of a giveaway. Ex'tent invests capital and other resources in unconventional and innovative projects that aim to make a profit but also have social and ecological objectives – projects such as car-pools, videoconferencing and a digital arts academy. Perhaps surprisingly, Wintzen's background and experience is in the ruthlessly competitive field of computer software.

Wintzen founded the Dutch subsidiary of GTE Information Systems Europe in 1973, which he subsequently bought out three years later for a nominal $5, after its American parent decided to end its IT operations on the continent. The company was subsequently renamed BSO (Bureau for Systems Development) and the Dutchman was back in business with 10 staff. He says that a mixture of luck, common sense and entrepreneurial spirit got him going. "When I started BSO, I had no business philosophy. I was a 30-year-old guy who had been in the army, and had then worked for Philips, the European Space Agency and GTE. I didn't know what I wanted. I knew, however, what I did not want: to be like my past employers."

Wintzen intuitively recognised the value of his workers and the importance of keeping them motivated, driving him to develop and implement an innovative cell organisational structure. As soon as the start-up had grown to a staff of more than 65, Wintzen split the company into two cells with each half functioning as a lean, competitive unit. This type of organisation worked well and was repeated over and over. Overheads stayed low and entrepreneurial instincts thrived, thanks to what Wintzen terms "friendly competition between peers". He is also convinced that "people work best with people they know, and when their own responsibility is the main engine driving enthusiasm and quality".

A flourishing BSO eventually merged with the software division of Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips, and was renamed BSO/Origin, with Wintzen at the helm. But even as the company was aggressively expanding across borders, Wintzen saw green. He introduced an innovative book-keeping system of 'environmental accounting', which tracked the ecological damage (and related costs) his company was causing in carrying out its business.

By 1995, BSO/Origin had grown into an international software-services company with 6,500 employees in some 100 offices in 24 countries, with global revenues of more than €400m and a customer base that included blue-chip accounts such as Unilever, Shell, Eastman Kodak, Procter & Gamble and Motorola. By the time BSO/Origin merged in 1996 with Philips' computer and data communications infrastructure division, Wintzen had decided it was time to move on and had already begun grooming his successor. He established Ex'tent the following year with the proceeds from the sale of his share in BSO/Origin. The 'Ex' sounds like the 'Eck' in Eckarts and 'tent' is Dutch slang for a small company.

Considering his background, it's no surprise that Wintzen sees electronics as a possible ecological saviour. "People who spend time in front of a screen are not burning gasoline. Flying electrons represent a far less material economy," he says. All material things and physical activities, he explains, are bound to affect the environment directly or indirectly. Now, if we could reduce or replace them with virtual counterparts, we could reduce their environmental impact. Human activity, he says, contains emotive elements, such as well-being, fun, excitement and entertainment, usually associated with physical objects or actions. These can often be replaced by digital equivalents (the rapidly growing gaming industry is a prime example), without the harmful repercussions associated with their physical counterparts. Significantly, industry and government have started to replace costly face-to-face communications with video conferencing. However, this scenario has not really taken off, says Wintzen, for one simple reason: "Participants talk to a screen instead of a camera, and therefore never look into each other's eyes." This makes the interaction impersonal, something Ex'tent claims to have rectified in its Eye Catcher video telephone, using 'unique mirror technology'.