Origin's Original

Dutch software tycoon Eckart Wintzen has made some changes in his life recently. And if he gets his way, he'll change your life, too.

Say you're looking for a new job in some technical or consulting capacity, or you're a manufacturer looking for experts to customize your software. A friend tells you to check out this Dutch computer services firm you dimly recall hearing about. So you do your homework. You ask around. You take a look at press coverage of the company. You ask for a couple of annual reports. And what you find is, um, just a tad out of the ordinary.

The company's founder and president speaks freely of the spiritual thrills he recently experienced in an ashram in India - then reminisces fondly about the thought-provoking conversations he had with Ulrike Meinhoff in the '60s, before she started blowing up generals and business tycoons and became West Germany's Public Enemy Number One. You discover a news article about a conference the company organized, an event that took place in the summer of 1995 in an abandoned Rotterdam power plant that had been transformed to look like a concentration camp. There were actors playing guards, complete with uniforms and German shepherds. The get-together also featured a performance artist taking off some of her clothes and a zoologist holding forth on the social life of ants, "the most successful species on Earth."

Then, when you flip through the firm's annual reports, you find not just the usual columns of numbers, but pasted-in tea bags and essays with titles like "Interrelations: The Essence of Life's Mystery." A few days later, a reliable source tells you the head of the company is an avid smoker - of hashish. Here's one president who inhales.

Be honest: at this point, are you confident that you can entrust your money, your career, your company's future to this outfit? Didn't think so. Chances are, you'd rather do a barefoot mambo on a pile of broken bottles. Maybe you've decided that these people must be flakes, weirdos, *artists *maybe - but that they don't know the first thing about running a business.

Know what? You'd be so wrong, it's not even funny.

Founder Eckart Wintzen has made more money than you can dream of. In 1995, his privately held company, BSO/Origin, had 6,500 employees in some 100 offices in 24 countries, with global revenues exceeding US$500 million. Wintzen's software services firm boasts a client list that includes Volvo, Texaco, Eastman Kodak, Procter & Gamble, and Motorola. Origin has "substantial client relations" with more than 100 of the top 500 companies in the world. In the two decades of its existence, 19 years have been profitable. Earlier this year, Wintzen's brainchild merged with Philips Communications and Processing Services, a division of the Dutch electronics giant. The new Origin has a global staff of about 11,000 and expects to rake in well over a billion bucks this year, going head-to-head with information technology giants such as Andersen Consulting and Electronic Data Systems.

That's a success story no matter how you slice it, but Wintzen's real achievement is not so much evidenced by his bulging bank account as by the unusual business model he has crafted: a global, decentralized company with a conscience. Origin might provide some welcome inspiration for the conglomerates and corporations whose CEOs keep yapping about, God help us, paradigm shifts.

Wintzen could have stayed on following the merger with the Philips unit, but after 20 years at the helm, he's had enough. He has more important things to do. Like changing the basis of the world economy, eliminating global unemployment, and saving the environment.

Oh yeah, and he's *really *looking forward to selling some great ice cream.

Twenty years ago, when Wintzen's firm was still called BSO (Bureau voor Systeem-Ontwikkeling, or Agency for System Development), he ran a kind of computer "plumbing business," hiring out his few programmers and system analysts by the hour or the day. Later, he and his staff started selling special solutions for clients, taking an assignment from design to implementation. Gradually, Origin took on the total automation needs of other companies - anything from running the software side of financial departments to devising custom-made operating systems.

That all seems unexciting enough, perhaps, but a closer look reveals that this wasn't entirely business as usual. While Origin is now only about an eighth the size of EDS, and a third the size of Andersen, its global impact is nonetheless remarkable for a freewheeling Dutch firm of humble beginnings. The achievement is due in large measure to Wintzen's status-quo-defying ways. The most important of those may well be his implementation of a benevolent kind of divide-and-conquer strategy, resulting in a flat hierarchy and high worker motivation.

Companies that call workers their most important asset are a dime a dozen, but BSO/Origin walked the walk. As soon as the start-up had grown to a staff of more than 100, Wintzen surprised his number two man with a divorce proposal: Why didn't they each take charge of different but connected companies by splitting their present firm in two halves? Then each half would function as a lean, competitive unit. And so corporate "cell division" was put to the test. It worked, and it was repeated over and over again, at least for a good many years. Overhead stayed low, entrepreneurial instincts thrived, and the best new people handled virtually any challenge Wintzen threw at them, knowing that they could rise through the ranks fast and perhaps one day head their own cells. The practice fostered what Wintzen calls "friendly competition between peers." The key: "Every guy who started a new cell wanted to show his former boss that results could be obtained better, faster."

The number of Origin's cells has actually shrunk in the last few years, even as the total staff has grown. Wintzen admits that cell division works less well for a company that must hire more and more specialists; then cells will have to become bigger. But the concept of splitting and replicating has not been abandoned. Even under the reign of the notoriously rigid and colorless Philips Corporation, which now owns a majority stake in Origin, the process continues, if at a slower pace.

Inspired by Origin's flat, small-is-beautiful management structure, staff generally displayed dedication and eagerness. That was excellent for business, but clients also liked being associated with a company that had acquired an aura of hipness and integrity. In a book naming the best Dutch companies to work for, Origin came out on top; the firm's top brass did not see individualism as a character flaw; the press was generally favorable. (In a few cases, though, financial journalists lambasted Wintzen for his too-fanciful ideas. Quote, Holland's leading business magazine, recently called his visions "sweet fireplace reveries, and nothing more.")

As the company's size and profits grew, Wintzen began to give as many as 10 public speeches a month. Having found a soapbox, he began talking less about the field of information technology and more about Earth's natural resources and irresponsible profitmaking. "And you know what?" he says. "People started giving me the time of day. Once you've made quite a bit of money, they figure you know something they don't. So they pay attention."

Dawn Cardi, a Manhattan business lawyer who occasionally works for Wintzen, has watched him gently cajole - as well as entertain - an audience of his peers. "I don't care how wacky he is, or is perceived to be; they listen to him because he's made a fortune," Cardi says. "More importantly, he hasn't done it their way. He belies their values. He says to them: In order to turn a profit, you don't *have *to crunch the human spirit."

No one who knew Eckart Wintzen in his days as a math and physics student at Leiden University would have pictured him as a relentless advocate for social change. That includes himself: he was a self-described "apolitical frat boy." It wasn't until the former frat boy took a job as a developer for the European Space Administration in Germany in the late '60s that he developed strong ideological passions. There, he fell in with a crowd of hard-left thinkers that included Ulrike Meinhoff, one of the later kingpins of the notorious Baader-Meinhoff terrorist group. Wintzen says he has never believed in violence and he thought Meinhoff's arguments much too extreme, but he enjoyed the stimulating mental exercise of their discussions. "I was certainly tolerated, but perhaps never fully accepted," he recalls. "After all, I was part of the establishment they opposed. Worse, I was a computer guy, and computers at that time were widely seen as instruments of government and big business. No one was thinking about *personal *computers, or about networks connecting people."

His fondness for computers started during a stint in the Dutch army in the early 1960s (until recently, serving in the military was mandatory in Holland). One day Wintzen came across classified documents about so-called shift registers, the basic components of a then-current generation of processors. "I was riveted by the beauty and brilliance of the principle behind it," he says. "That's when I figured I had to find a way to be a part of the computer world."

Ever since, Wintzen has heard the siren call of cutting-edge technology; several times, he has joined in its chorus. He has lobbied hard, if not very successfully, for a large-bandwidth network connecting millions of Dutch homes. One of BSO/Origin's divisions is a research and trend-watching outfit with a slightly grandiose name: the Media Lab. Like its world-renowned namesake in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wintzen's version focuses on exploring the possibilities of new media. There's a practical payoff, too. Origin's international clients and third parties have benefited from proprietary chips, compression schemes, and storage solutions developed by the Dutch Media Lab.

Despite his embrace of technology, Wintzen is an avowed computer klutz. When a new printer for his home didn't work, he figured it might be the external power supply and connected the power brick for his PC to the printer instead. The result: "A particularly advanced form of multimedia," he grins. "Whatever had been on my screen appeared to be automatically converted into smoke signals." He also recalls that one day last year, he typed a lot of letters during a long, feverishly inspired session - then zapped all of them when he unthinkingly hit the off switch at the end of his work session. For 12 hours, he had forgotten to hit Save.

"People think I must be some kind of computer guru or hacker, but computers are not my profession," he explains, grinning. "Being a good manager is."

When God distributed quirkiness, she slipped up while Eckart Wintzen was at the head of the line. Wintzen, it seems, received a triple dose. This manifests itself in a thousand ways. There's the slightly unkempt, shoulder-length hair and the stubble on his fleshy jowls. (When Tony Stepanski, who now runs Origin USA, first met Wintzen, the Dutchman looked "like he'd fallen off the back of a garbage truck," Stepanski recalls.) Wintzen's predilection for paisley vests and undiplomatic talk is famous. He is eccentric enough that he had his blood type listed in a recent corporate report (A positive) and included the amount of human waste produced in one year by all of Origin's employees. That latest number is not a sign of any lingering childhood fixation but part of a bookkeeping method called "environmental accounting" that Wintzen has been pioneering for at least half a decade.

The basic tenet is that it is not enough for a company to merely look at its profit margins, its contribution to the economy. Ecology must be brought into the equation. So in addition to issuing a standard financial report, practitioners of environmental accounting disclose the burden that their business places on the ecosystem. This burden is expressed in hard currency, the central question being, What would it cost to either undo the environmental damage or to develop a responsible alternative? Many factors are taken into consideration, from the use of power and water to the number of road and air miles traveled and their associated atmospheric emissions.

All these components are examples of "extracted value," Wintzen explains in his sonorous voice, with an inflection that offers a hint of his upper-middle-class upbringing (both his parents were physicians). His notions about extracted value and asking companies to repay the damage are farther-reaching and more fundamental than "just tacking on an ecotax," to which he is opposed. "The problem with ecotax," says Wintzen, "is that it's tied to certain substances, like fuels or lead. But what if you turn to a method or device that helps you lower that use, and it results in other ecological damage that just doesn't happen to be taxed? For instance, to diminish tailpipe emissions, you could perhaps use some sort of nasty nuclear catalytic converter; the cure might end up being worse than the disease. There are no such loopholes with the concept of extracted value."

But even proponents of the concept, such as Chris Stinson, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Texas at Austin, acknowledge its problems. If ecological bookkeeping were to be made mandatory for all companies in the developed world, as Wintzen proposes, "one difficult issue is determining when one firm's impact stops and another firm's impact starts," says Stinson. "The same issue arises when we try to estimate what it would cost to undo the environmental damage. If I purchase electricity for my business, is *my *firm responsible for the environmental impact of the electricity production, or is the electric utility? Also, setting the correct level of these taxes is a nontrivial problem. Too high a tax discourages business; too low a tax continues to encourage pollution."

Nola Buhr, an assistant professor at Binghamton University's School of Management in Binghamton, New York, scratched her head when she saw one of Origin's earlier environmental annual reports. "The values that Origin assigns in its bookkeeping are very slippery amounts. You could substitute defensible values that are vastly different." This slipperiness, says Buhr, often arises in ecological debates - such as in the endless polemic about cloth versus throwaway diapers, or whether McDonald's should use paper or styrofoam to package its burgers. Still, Buhr believes that Origin deserves credit for being bold enough to experiment with environmental accounting. "And as far as those slippery measurements go, you could say that it's better to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong by ignoring the issue altogether."

Wintzen envisions a time "not so far in the future" when the extracted value of a product - whether it's a can of beans, a computer, or a car - will be listed on the packaging, next to the calorie count or the miles per gallon. To hear him tell it, this will do a lot more than facilitate public scrutiny of a company's environmental record. It will lead to (don't shoot) new taxes, which, would you believe it, are actually *good *for you - or at least good for future generations. Put a tax on the use of natural resources, Wintzen says. Phase it in gradually, over 20 or 30 years, until you reach the point at which any company annually repays its total extracted value for the preceding year. It'd be a powerful incentive for consumers and businesses to change their buying and manufacturing habits. Just as important, the tax revenue could be used to repair the damage to the extent possible.

That's the nutshell version of Wintzen's blueprint for a "sustainable economy," as opposed to an economy that is perversely set up to promote unlimited growth on a planet of limited resources. The plan is breathtaking in its scope and implications, and it will never work - or will it? Just getting new legislation written and implemented all over the world is a herculean task. It's probably fair to expect a standard-setting and controlling agency, a mix of EPA and IRS perhaps, that would give new meaningto the word bureaucracy.

"It's ultimately up to the people to decide," Wintzen shrugs. "I'm working on a book, with a friend, Lisette Schuitemaker, in which I'm presenting my case. I'm fairly confident that we'll turn it into a readable, compelling argument. In a *fun *way, without my having to resort to the role of the bully in the pulpit. It'll be the best possible vehicle to spread the idea."

He knows that oil cartels and other Second Wave manufacturers will fight initiatives like his every step of the way and is cheerily undaunted by the prospect. "All I ask is that people think this through with an open mind. Ideally, their collective change of heart will convince the legislators that the time is ripe. Public opinion might prove more powerful than the lobbying efforts of fossil fuel companies."

To the world's oil barons, Wintzen has this to say: Relax, it's not going to happen overnight. "But the time to develop clean, unlimited resources for the mass market - solar energy, wind energy, and the like - is now. They have three decades to come up with something good. That's a long time. Think about how much our world changed in the past 30 years; it's mind-boggling. It's not revolutionary change I'm suggesting: it's *managed *change, and it can be relatively painless."

Of course, there's considerable irony in the fact that BSO/Origin has never shunned work from companies with, well, less than stellar ecological records, such as Shell and Ciba-Geigy. But at least his business success has given Wintzen and his views a degree of respectability among industrialists, politicians, and other power brokers. Such sometimes grudging esteem would be unthinkable if the 56-year-old entrepreneur were an ideological hard-liner. These days, when he calls a member of the Dutch cabinet, the secretary often puts him right through. He is on friendly terms with Prince Charles. He corresponds with the president of The Club of Rome.

And so it is that, with enviable ease, Wintzen drifts in and out of the various roles he assumes: from member of the old-boy network to New Age philosopher, from technophile to tree hugger, from mogul to moralist.

The kind of high-level access Wintzen is used to might erode now that he is no longer at the helm of a mighty multinational. After retiring from Origin earlier this year, he has been working on his book and heading a start-up called Ex'tent (a Dutch/English pun, meaning Eck's tent, *tent *being a Dutch colloquial term for company). Ex'tent offers management and financial support to small companies that strive to make a difference. That includes a bimonthly magazine, called Source, about ethical ways to do business; and an American biotechnology firm that's working on the development of Peptide T, said to counteract, among other afflictions, HIV, psoriasis, and certain neuropsychiatric defects.

Perhaps most of all, his energy will go into hawking ice cream. And only one ice cream can possibly be right for Eckart Wintzen. He wants to sell something that is somehow meaningful - something with a soul. So Wintzen is the man who has just introduced the good citizens of the Benelux countries to a couple of retro-hippies from Vermont and the dairy product that made them famous: Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Fifteen percent of the shares in the European venture will go to Human Rights Watch, as a donation.

Wintzen's target audience may be bigger then ever - millions of ice cream lovers - but there's a degree of isolation in starting a new business that worries those close to him. "Eckart flourishes when he is surrounded, and sometimes reined in, by critical management," says Trude Maas, director of human talent at the Dutch Origin branch. "If he isn't, he might go too fast for his own good. He needs people around him with the guts to tell him when he isn't talking sense."

Ton Soetekouw, the managing director of Cartera, a corporate finance company, has seen a gradual change in his compadre. "His social concerns seem to become more prominent than his business concerns. He is an incredible business talent with a proven track record. At times, though, he has perhaps been a little too different and colorful, to the point where he almost becomes a cartoon of himself. Thankfully, he has always had people around him who could summon him back down to earth."

Indeed, conversing with Eckart Wintzen, and keeping up with him, is no easy task. He is so driven, so bent on convincing whoever engages him in discussion that he rarely manages to explain his expansive views in a methodical manner. Sentences, then entire threads of conversation, are cut short; one thought begets another, and off his mind goes, exploring another facet of a problem or, more often, examining a different problem entirely. Spend a few days with him and you begin to understand that the world according to Wintzen is a ragtag, krazy-kolor tapestry of firm convictions and tentative theories, some with a sheen of self-evident truth, others breathtakingly reckless, brash, simplistic perhaps - but never dull.

Sometimes he thinks aloud rather than pontificating on any deeply held belief. During the first of four long interviews, after he had cooked us a chili dinner in the kitchen of his picturesque farmhouse 30 miles south of Amsterdam, the conversation turned to illegal substances, and he propounded legalizing all drugs "to take the crime out of the process." He wasn't suggesting controlled distribution through doctors and pharmacies; he was talking about letting pharmaceutical companies sell brand-name cocaine and heroin next to the mouthwash and aspirin at your local Shop 'n' Save. An hour later, Wintzen abandoned the idea, laughing, and conceding after much heated argument that it might have disastrous effects. But the intellectual rush of challenging and being challenged, of thinking on his feet, had left him almost giddy, his eyes glinting contentedly behind his Lennon-style glasses.

On other topics, Wintzen is just as eager to plunge into debate, but not so easy to dissuade. Take the extracted value tax. Wouldn't it send prices soaring and force the economy into a tailspin?

"Not if you concomitantly lower other business taxes," he says, lighting a small pipe that contains a product certain coffee shops in Holland are famous for. And he unfolds the other half of his plan. "Our world has developed a system of taxation in which most of what businesses fork over is personnel related, such as tax on wages and employers' mandatory social contributions to the welfare state. So, the more people you employ, the higher your taxes. It's not hard to see how companies respond to that. Since the taxation system has made workers expensive, as an entrepreneur or a corporation you try to make do with as few of them as you can, even if that means you use more energy and raw materials - because after all, those expenditures carry much, much lower taxes."

It's past 2 a.m. when a lingering jet lag threatens to shut down my brain, and I suggest we call it a day. Wintzen is as close to being hyper as anyone can be who's just been through a day of fielding a thousand managerial responsibilities and then spent an evening lecturing to a reporter while frequently lurking on a fun-filled little pipe.

Five hours later there's a rap on the door. We have to make it to one of Wintzen's meetings, 50 miles away, by nine. Groggy and bleary-eyed, I eventually find my way into the passenger seat of his Renault Twingo, one of the two or three smallest new cars in Europe and hardly the kind of vehicle you'd expect from a member of the monied class - which is, of course, the point. Wintzen is revving the puny engine, and while I'm still fumbling for the safety belt, he's hit the road. He points to a handful of windmills in the foggy Dutch landscape. Not the type you see on picture postcards, but the modern "propeller-on-a-pole" variety. Some of Wintzen's personal money is invested in a wind energy project, not because he expects to reap big financial returns, but because he sees it as a way of compensating for the electrical power he uses in his personal life.

Later, on the way home, he tests this idea on me: Why not have fewer brands and models of cars and achieve differentiation by creating *service *options you can purchase with your new vehicle?

"For instance, the more expensive model may be essentially the same as the inexpensive one - but it comes with a driver," Wintzen says. "If you can't afford that, you can opt to pay less money for a package that includes daily visits from a maintenance person who checks the oil and the tires and washes your windshield. And the most expensive option is to have the driver *plus *a custom paint job for your car by some famous artist. When you make labor cheaper and raw materials pricier, service and craftsmanship will become more important in terms of the perceived value of a product."

And while he's on the subject: his plan would have a terrific effect on overall unemployment, he enthuses. "At present, unemployment hovers around 11 percent, at least in the EC. And that's only the *official *number, which is fantastically flattened. There is a lot of hidden unemployment - as much as 25 percent in some European countries, including Holland. Under my proposal, those jobless millions will get a chance to go back to work, to reattach some purpose to their lives."

His own sense of purpose comes from doing things he believes in, and that includes a keen interest in atom-based publishing. Despite his affection for things newfangled, Wintzen is hooked on old media, too. He even helped start three publications. Apart from Source, there's Ode, a philosophical Dutch New Age periodical. The third magazine was an early version of Wired, which BSO/Origin financed in early 1991 with a one-time contribution of 60,000 guilders, about US$36,000. (Disclosure: The contract between Wintzen and Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe called for a prototype of a new consumer technology magazine, to be partially distributed within BSO/Origin as an alternative to the company newsletter. That prototype was never printed, but Wintzen, impressed with it, approved payment nonetheless. Wintzen never invested money in Wired, which was eventually launched as a USconsumer magazine in 1992.)

If PCs can be a mixed blessing for Wintzen personally, he has no qualms about their potential to transform the world. In fact, he says, the PC revolution coincides beautifully with his plea to cut down on the use of gas and kerosene, because teleconferencing will drastically reduce the number of miles traveled. Plus, computer networks will make it harder and harder to sustain the current tax system. "Taxability will simply drop away in many cases as business takes place supranationally, across networks," Wintzen predicts. "In an information economy, the main commodity becomes software and services, not goods. Offering services is people-intensive work, but as more people flock to online jobs, their labor becomes less visible to a government that wishes to tax it. Besides, even if there's a record of each digital transaction involving software or a service, which government taxes what part? My point is, governments may well be forced to let go of the idea of taxing labor. To keep up revenues, they'd pretty much have to look into taxing raw materials used to manufacture goods - because goods are much easier to keep track of."

We may not have to rely on legislators to reverse the system. "The course of history will reverse it for them," Wintzen says. "All they can do is follow."