What are the challenges a global executive search company like yours faces in Japan?
One of the biggest challenge we face in Japan is to keep pace with technology. The biggest problem I've is to find people who are capable of meeting the job specifications of the client. Technology has changed so drastically that many people haven't had the opportunity to be trained. That's why India, which because of the language which lends itself to the software development has been so adaptable to meet that challenge.

What potential does the Indian market hold for Japanese companies in the search business?
Japanese companies right now are not expanding anywhere because Japan has been in recession. In India, there's a lot of development in telecommunication and software. And with the engineering and technical capabilities of Indians, Japanese companies would perhaps have to set up a base in India.

We have been approached by a number companies to locate and develop manpower based in Japan but the problem is language. While Indians have the technical capabilities they don't have the local language capability which Japanese companies are very particular about.

Would you like to share some learnings from your experiences in cross- border searches?
The business of the business, as I say, is that the culture of a company has to be established. Many companies in the past have basically not followed their own business culture and they have succumbed to the local culture, which in fact, diffuses and diverges the business structure they have. It's very important that a company maintains that what has made them successful at one place will make them successful in the rest of the world. Coke didn't lose that, they kept their strength and that's why after a period of time, they became successful in Japan.

Your view seems to be in contradiction of the prevailing school of thought which believes in localisation.

I don't think so. I understand the importance of developing the local business but certainly no one is in business to give it away. If they have to maintain a business, they've to be in control of their operations. You have to basically understand your business and go with your strengths, and if you don't, you lose it. For consultancies, recession is the time to make hay while the sun shines, isn't it?

That's a double-edged sword. Japanese companies, traditionally, because of the conservative nature have not used consultants. Ocassionally, they have used consultants who can recommend practices for them to follow in their overseas market but in Japan that's very rare.

A lot of these companies have been subject to acquisitions and partnerships in the past because of the conservative nature of the Japanese. But over the last several years they had to adapt and have come under pressure from their own declining market to go into partnerships in, say, telecommunications. They basically have reached a level where the rest of the world has become competitive with them because of that costing which is higher than some of the other South East Asian countries. They had-everything, in my opinion, overpriced and overvalued.

From our standpoint, that's not a bad situation for us because our business is always dependent upon the foreign companies and because we are still growing - we grew to $75 million, last year.

Could you throw some light on the new, emerging management ideas and concepts in Japan?
With the Japanese companies there hasn't been a lot of new thinking and that's one of the reason why they continue to be submerged in recession. The restructuring has been very slow because of their conservative attitude-there's a problem.

Are you implying that Japanese management gurus and protaganists have become irrelevant in Japan's current economy?
I'd say that they're still relevant from the standpoint of thinking that was developed. A lot depends on the education and the environment you have. If you are educated one way and your environment has created a set of circumstances that allow you to use your intelligence effectively, then it's still possible. But if outside circumstances change your environment, then what you could do before may no longer hold true for the present and the future. All I'm saying is that it has been slow for the Japanese to rethink their economy and the world outside.