The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Why New Salespeople Struggle New hires, whether they are brand-new to sales or just new to the company, almost always take time before they start delivering results. Yet leaders in Japan often expect immediate miracles. The reality is that ramp-up takes time, especially in a culture where relationships drive business. Even experienced people entering a new organisation need months to learn interna...

  Why Japanese Corporate Scandals Keep Happening — And What Leaders Must Do To Prevent Them Why do corporate scandals keep repeating in Japan? Japan has been hit again and again by revelations of non-compliance — from  Nissan's faulty vehicle inspections  in 2017 to  Kobe Steel's falsified data  and beyond. In some cases, these practices stretched on for decades before discovery. On the surface, c...

Let's talk about sales, and why the new year always feels like a repeat performance. Greek myths rarely have happy endings. They are mostly cautionary tales, reminders of how the Gods treated humans like toys. One myth, in particular, perfectly captures the life of a salesperson: the story of Sisyphus. He was condemned to push a massive rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again, foreve...

At some stage in every career, the moment arrives: you're asked to give a presentation. Early on, it may be a straightforward project update delivered to colleagues or a report shared with your manager. But as you advance, the scope expands. Suddenly you're addressing a whole-company kickoff, an executive offsite, or even speaking on behalf of your firm or industry at a public event. That leap — f...

Negotiating in Japan is never just about numbers on a contract. It is about trust, credibility, and ensuring that the relationship remains intact long after the ink is dry. Unlike in Western business settings, where aggressive tactics or rapid deals are often admired, in Japan negotiations unfold slowly, with harmony and continuity as the guiding principles. The key is to combine negotiation frame...

Our image of negotiating tends to be highly influenced by the winner takes all model.  This is the transactional process where one side outwits the other and receives the majority of the value.  Think about your own business?  How many business partners do you have where this would apply?  For the vast majority of cases we are not after a single sale.  We are thinking about LTV – the life time val...

Presenting isn't always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement.  Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed.  Think meetings with the Board, the unions, shareholders, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room.  It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation in Japan and suddenly find yourself confronting a...

So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork.  This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice.  This is fake news.  The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke...

Presenting to buying teams is very tricky in Japan.  Because of the convoluted decision making process here, there will be many voices involved in the final decision. What makes it even harder is that some of those key influencers may not ever be present in the meeting.  Those proposing the change have to go around to each one of them and get their chop on the piece of paper authorizing the buying...

How should we dress when presenting and does it actually matter?  Yep, it matters - particularly in Japan.  Japan is a very formal country, in love with ceremony, pomp and circumstance.  Always up your formality level in dress terms in Japan, compared to how formal you think will be enough.  This was a big shock for this Aussie boy from Brisbane, who spent a good chunk of his life wearing shorts a...

We don't run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses.  There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play.  If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity.  It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches.  Ho...

We see Japan as a modern, high tech country very advanced in so many sectors.  Sales is not one of them.  Consultative selling is very passé in the West, yet it has hardly swum ashore here as yet.  There are some cultural traits in Japan that work against sales success, such as not initiating a conversation with strangers.  This makes networking a bit tricky to say the least. We train salespeople...

Storytelling is one of those things that we all know about, but where we could do a much better job of utilising this facility in business.  It allows us to engage the audience in a way that makes our message more accessible.  In any presentation there may be some key information or messages we wish to relay and yet we rarely wrap this information up in a story.  As an audience we are more open to...

 We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run i...

Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people.  There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting.  It may be a pitch to secure the business, or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we h...

We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientat...

 Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years.  What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing?  Those who don't study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.  Sounds reasonable doesn't it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time.  The only issue is that the...

Here is an important mantra: We don't want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder.  Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before.  Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service.  Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceiv...

The New Year's resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline.  Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat.  The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible.  We learn as we go along and we add...

351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking "this has nothing to do with my leadership", you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn't talk to them enough because they are too busy, don't have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these...

350 The Rule Of Three    Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year's revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn't.  Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year?  That sinking feeling of , "last year was hard and here we go again, but this time wit...

 I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students.  The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment.  This was pretty grand affair.  The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School.  Ma...

The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our "superiors" or "the first among equals". We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you beco...

  Poor customer service really irritates us.  When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the firm.  We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it.  We don't see the processes as separate.  In this Age of Distraction, people's time has become compressed.  They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much perman...

Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team's performance.  Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter.  Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points.  Presenting should be no different.  Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speak...