Story and Objectives of our Founding
I am the founder of Passion Quest, Takashi Kano. For more than a decade since 2008, I have discussed the significance and effects of executive coaching with several hundred clients through the practice of traditional coaching of business operators and managers. Based on this kind of real-world experience, I have thought every day about what kind of approach will better please the clients.
From 2008 to 2021, I worked in coaching as an expert at a human resources development company that specialized primarily in coaching. However with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the state of the world changed dramatically.
As I reached the milestone of turning 50 years old, I strongly felt that it would be difficult to continue being of use to this dramatically changing world by continuing to work in the same way as before. I felt that we would be unable to adapt to these large changes without changing something ourselves.
In a world of deepening chaos and confusion, what supported my thinking were the words left by my entrepreneur grandfather: “Live with Originality.”
Instead of taking over the family brewery business, with the help of his former teacher, my grandfather Goro Kano went to study in Germany – at that time a revolutionary country. He invented an advanced electronic measurement device. Unfortunately, he passed away before I was born and while I never heard the voice of my grandfather directly, in my family many times I heard his words explaining the importance of doing something different from other people.
- What is the gap between what is provided by business operator support services and what is actually needed by business operators?
- If there is an originality that one can make use of when providing support to business operators, what is it?
- In order to further increase the performance of a business operator, what kind of support services are best?
Asking these kinds of questions, and with the words of my grandfather at my back, I decided that I wanted to promote and provide services that were boldly unique.
When I graduated (retired) from being a businessman in 2021, I did not launch a business right away but instead decided to study at graduate school. I thought that if I hastened to start a business on an extension of the same lines as my past activities, it would be difficult to produce something original. In this dramatically changing world, I felt it was best to reset my thinking and take time to study. I was painfully aware that it had been a long time since this coach who stimulated learning had learned something himself.
Because my research 20 years earlier at a graduate school for working professionals (MBA) centered on leadership, careers, and motivation, and because I had focused on an approach to organizational culture, internal communication, and improving leadership through my actual work in coaching, I felt that my learning was unbalanced toward matters inside a company.
However actual business management requires dialogue, communication, negotiation, and decision-making not only within the company but also with a diverse range of external stakeholders. Intending to learn about this kind of communication with outside stakeholders, for the second time in my life in the spring of 2021, I once again knocked at the gates of a graduate school for working professionals in order to learn about PR and branding.
For more than a decade, I had lived immersed in coaching. For me, putting aside the title of coach and studying the unknown field of public relations together with a diverse range of others from different fields was an extremely valuable opportunity to refresh myself and achieve personal growth. I felt some pride in having pursued communication in my own way in the past, however these days I spent in study taught me that communication as I had previously understood it was limited.
For two years as I studied a new field with new companions, I naturally made progress in my work of conceptualizing original services, and was able to create a picture of the new services that I wanted to present to the world. At the same time when I graduated from graduate school, I decided to launch Passion Quest in April 2023.
As a result, I was working under conditions that were significantly different from executive coaching, but as a result of continually pursuing a better approach to supporting business operators and my grandfather’s words “Live with Originality”, this was what I arrived at.
