Having quit her job as CIO of U.K. insurer Prudential last month to join fledgling New Star Asset Management, Zemek, 46, plans to spend the customary six-month pause between firms restoring order to the overgrown verdure at her Kent home.
When Zemek and her husband gave up the hurly-burly of London last year to commute from the bucolic countryside, they looked for a house with “100 feet or so of garden to enjoy,” she says. Instead, they fell in love with one that had “six acres of brambles.” Zemek, who knows how to delegate, has enlisted a gardener and a “bramble-eating” lawn mower to wage her brush war. She plans to grow a diversified crop of trees, shrubs, flowers, fruit and vegetables.
Why did she quit one of British fund management’s biggest jobs to join year-old New Star? “The further away I got from managing bond portfolios, the more I missed it,” says Zemek, who was head of fixed income at M&G Investment Management when Pru bought it in 1999. “New Star is small and independent, and [founder] John Duffield is building an impressive team. It was a God-given opportunity to start afresh on a blank canvas.” Rather like her garden.
