"I've been working on the commercial side of watches for 20 or more years. I recently spent three months with the production guys, seeing what they do every day, really learning. I was completely immersed - they put me on the bench trying indexes on dials. It's incredible what they do and we don't even communicate 10 per cent of that true artistry of what these people do. When we tell people how these things are really made, they are going to go crazy. We don't do it enough. We could do so much more with high-end watches - there's so much potential.
I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy and I think if we work on educating people more, in Asia, for example, explain what we do and how we do it, then the upside is huge. There are a lot of watchmakers, and people who don't know about watchmaking might think we're all the same. But if you ask these watchmakers to put their movements on the table, the difference becomes apparent. It's one thing to talk about making movements, it's another to actually do it, and I feel we do it very well. The watch industry is very conservative. I might seem different, but that's because I don't follow, and I try myself, and through the company, to create our own path.
I'm very straight-forward: in a good way and in a bad way. If I don't like someone I'm not going to play nice - I don't care. I respect people, of course, but if you cross my path and don't behave the right way, no matter who you are, I'm going to tell you. One of my biggest rewards in life, indeed passions in life, is putting people together, creating an environment for people to realise their potential. That's my thing. I also love making people do things that they would never normally do. Especially in Asia.
I took the job of CEO two years ago and on my first trip to China I had dinner with all the company executives. There's 17 of us around the table, the majority of them older Chinese and very proper. We were having dinner at an Italian place. It was nice, but I thought that we could get them to loosen up a bit. At the end of the dinner, I asked the top executive to stand and taught him how to do the US way of greeting. You know, like a fist bump and the athlete hug. So we did it. He loved it. It's funny, I arranged for this executive to meet my friend Pierre Hermé in Paris and when we saw each other he greeted me that way.