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―Currently JKSK is interviewing all these top CEOs and chairmen of various corporations, who are committed to Diversity, but we decided to take a little different approach this time and ask someone who is a foreign national in charge of a big corporation to talk about Diversity. We have selected you as one of the top batters.
First of all, we would like to find out a little bit more about your company, Panache, including the history of its founding and development, overview of its operations and the scale, and the make up of the workforce. I am also curious why you chose the name, Panache.
 Well, thank you very much! Okay. I'd start with that, because in Japan people always want to know what is the meaning of the company name, and there is usually a story behind the name. I was thinking for a long time what was a good name for the company, easy to pronounce, and it had to have some meaning. And the word, Panache, is a very nice word, because in simple terms it means a stylish way of doing something. Something looks to be easy, something done with a little bit of flair.
My thought at the start of the company was that everything we do should have certain panache, a certain style about it. Importantly the people that work for the company, in particular the engineers, they should be so skilful that it looks like what they do is so easy, and therefore, they do it with panache. I always had the image of Fred Astaire in my mind, dancing.
―Fred Astaire from Hollywood films?
In my mind, he dances with panache, in the sense that nobody probably appreciates the hours of practice that goes into any routine that he does, so that when he actually dances, he makes it look very easy. So I thought, okay, that is how we should run this company. That was the logic behind the name.
As you may know, I started the company in December, 1993, so we are in the 14th year. We started off originally providing Apple Macintosh specialized staff, and these were people who were either bilingual with Apple Macintosh skills. We spent 2 years concentrating only on Apple Macintosh, staff training on many different creative applications, and then, looking after people's computers, but what I realized after 2 years was that this market was very small.
At that time, Apple was at its peak in their market share in Japan. I think it had over 10%, may be even 13% of the PC market, and I think it has never had that since then. So it was a good time to be concentrating on that market. Anyway, I then realized that it was a relatively small market so that we should consider the Windows environment as well.
I hired someone to help me grow that business, and we therefore became a lot more focused on the corporate market. So from about 1995 we started approaching larger foreign nationals to provide them with desk top support engineers, help desk engineers, and whatever requirements that they had for IT people, that typically required English and Japanese. We expanded in that direction.
Now the company is concentrating on providing bilingual IT staff, looking after people's computer networks, and we are looking at other new technology that is becoming popular, which is for example, voice over IP, computerized phone systems, where you run your phone through a computer. One of the advantages of that is that you can have voice mail go straight onto your computer, so you can check your messages from your mail, so you don't have to be in your office to check your messages. It is a lot more flexible and cheap. Also it means that if you move from one side of Tokyo to another, you can keep the same phone number.
―This of course allows flexibility in work life balance.
Exactly, yes! In fact, within Panache I think we are a very good company to talk about Diversity, but also we have looked at what the trends are.
―How come you started your business in Japan, because you said that more than 90% of your clients are not Japanese, and more than 50% of your engineers are non-Japanese?
To answer your first question, I like Japan very much, indeed for a number of reasons. I like the people I meet here in Tokyo with whom I do business and I meet socially.
―Before you came here, you did not meet any Japanese, right?
I hadn't met Japanese before coming here so it was a new experience.
―You came to Japan 21 years ago; then you spent several years and met some Japanese. Then, you started to think about doing business?
I came here in 1985 for 6 months. There was an immediate rapport, something clicked when I came here. At that time, I decided that I wanted to come back. I came back again for half a year in 1987 and then in 1990, and I have been here since. Initially I liked the fact that some of the old values still applied in Japan about respect, politeness, efficiency, safety; a respect for each other is, I think, a big thing. The fact that you can leave a bag somewhere and it doesn't get touched. (Laughter) Of course, I mean NOT unattended bag in the station. You can be somewhere at an event with many people and leave something, your bag, on the seat. When I first came here, going into restaurants where people would leave their bags on their seats to reserve their seats, and then, they'd go off and buy their lunch and come back again. To me as an Englishman, it was bizarre. Wow! In England it is opposite, we take our bags, but in Japan people leave their bags to guard their seats.
I thought that was wonderful.
Japan still is the 2nd most important market for most multi-national companies, and therefore, they still send their best people here, so from that point of view, I meet very bright people here.
―Excellent people. Standard is very high.
That's right. Over the years that I have become more established here, I am able to meet a broad spectrum of people from a young designer who is struggling to get established through to ambassadors and top business people. That for me is very stimulating.
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