Mike Bennetts
speaker
625 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 13 Jun
Mike Bennetts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So you were the boss, the founding CEO of Z Energy, right?
Yes.
So in 2010, New Zealand Super and Infratil bought the assets off Shell in New Zealand, and they asked me to be the chief executive, 1st of April, April Fool's Day, 2010.
So I came in
to do that.
I didn't really want to at one level do that.
I'd spent all of my working career prior to that working for BP, mostly globally.
And I swore I didn't want to go into the oil and gas business again, but this seemed to be quite a unique opportunity.
And part of it, my commitment to climate change or doing something about the impacts of those fossil fuels on climate change was the reason why I took that job in the first place.
Do people call you a hypocrite being the fuel boss and then having that side too?
How did that work?
Yes, some people would, and I totally understand it and I can fully appreciate it because I felt somewhat hypocritical myself.
But I worked on what I call context, right?
So my world, particularly the world of leadership coaching I do today, is that people's thoughts, feelings, behaviours and actions are entirely consistent with how things show up for them.
So when I first turned up with the company, we were a large company.
We were selling about 30% of New Zealand's transport fuels.
We were right in the middle of the problem.
We had no money to do anything about investing in climate change because we were a low-margin business.
Return on capital was pretty poor, which is really why Infertile and New Zealand Super got such a good deal.
So there was a context that said anything you do here is going to be hypocritical.
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