With some 11,600 employees engaged in IT services in 130 subsidiaries across 25 countries, the growth of the Danir Group has been one of the great success stories of the digital age. Built and owned for 37 years by Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson, the company’s unfailing ability to respond quickly and effectively to rapidly changing market conditions has earned it a place at the top tier of global tech consulting with a focus on R&D.
Such an achievement would be enough for most people, but then Dan Olofsson isn’t like most people. At the age of 50, he decided that it was time to step back from the CEO role to have more time for what he calls “life quality projects.”
Olofsson decided to embark on what he describes in his autobiography My Three Lives as his “third life,” which he has dedicated to a series of NGOs, with Africa as a primary focus.
Olofsson’s love affair with Africa began more than 20 years before when he fell under the continent’s spell during hunting trips, so much so that he and his wife, Christin, decided to buy land there on which to build a family villa. Soon after that, though, he had a radical change of heart and switched from hunting game to admiring it and to the preservation of wildlife.
In 2002, Dan and Christin founded the Thanda Group and bought a 14,000-hectare cattle farm in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, which they set about converting into a natural habitat for big game through a program of reforestation and the construction of wells and dams. Olofsson then employed a professional wildlife team to oversee the thousands of animals. One of the centerpieces of the park is Thanda Lodge and its nine luxury bush suites where guests can relax and be pampered after excursions into the bush to marvel at the wildlife. Since then, Olofsson has expanded the concept of combining luxury tourism with conservation by acquiring a protected marine reserve off the coast of Tanzania, and the four-berth Over the Rainbow of London classic cruise ship.
Soon after, he and Christin established the not-for-profit Star for Life organization, one of the first and perhaps still most successful initiatives relating to AIDS and the exponential increase in sufferers in the first decade of the current millennium. From the outset, Olofsson put his management skil
