The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

In a previous episode, I mentioned a Spa magazine survey in Japan of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. The Lehman Shock in 2008 opened to door to job losses in larger companies, someth...

This is an old saying in sales and one we forget at our cost.  We might have made the sale and then we keep moving forward.  We get wrapped up in the intricacies of the getting other customers to commit and in the logistical details of delivering our previously sold service or product.  Our schedule fills up quickly and we have filled it with the present and future, not the past.  That customer we...

The head of a pin isn't much real estate is it ?   The metaphor for presenting is to have pin point accuracy around what you are presenting. Going straight to the slide deck production component dilutes our message concentration and takes us too broad.  This should be the last element, rather than the first.  The temptation though is to get into thinking about different visuals, graphs, statistics...

A number of years ago, I recall reading in Japan's Spa magazine , the results of a survey they completed of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose.   Apart from not enough money, in a time o...

"We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan", is an old saw that is still true today.  Despite an avalanche of tools to help us plan well, we still manage to do a lousy job of it.  Another oldie goldie is "a good workman doesn't blame his tools" and so this applies perfectly to the tech panoply we have at our fingertips. Having tools available and using them at all, much less effectively, is the bugbe...

In 2017 METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and industry), and the peak industry bodies the Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and industry launched their Premium Friday campaign, encouraging firms to allow their workers to depart early on the last Friday of each month.  Approximately 70% of the Japanese economy is based on domestic consumption and the idea is to...

There is an old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics.  An often misquoted statistic in the presenting world is that 55% of your impression on an audience is based on how you are dressed.  Some coaches are advising on this basis and it is only partially true.  Professor Mehrabian's research at UCLA did nominate that particular percentage, but he did so with an important caveat.  When what we...

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don't we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level. I was attending such a presentation rec...

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don't we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level.   I was attending such a presentation r...

Being persuasive is not down to luck or accident, it is the result of good planning and execution.  This is the problem.  The vast majority of speakers do not prepare properly.  The slide deck gets all the attention, the data gets lots of love, the logistics are thoroughly checked.  The planning component?  Not enough going into that effort unfortunately.  How can we become more persuasive?  There...

When a presentation event unintentionally turns into comedic relief, you know you have a major credibility problem.  Imagine it is after work, a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of people, the booze and small talk all free flowing.  The MC attempts to introduce the main host of the event, to make some worthy remarks.  The hum continues as people are more riveted by their own conversation than a...

In sales we can defeat ourselves, because our way of thinking isn't positive enough.  Consequently, we don't challenge the status quo and we accept our lot, which usually doesn't amount to much.  There is a better way   There are two players in this mental game of sales.  The buyer and the seller and they are playing with entirely different strategies.  For the buyer, the idea of a salesperson sym...

Intention in life is key.  Are we living an intentional life or are we a buffeted bystander of what is happening around us?  We have our personal vision, aspirations, goals, targets or maybe not.  Sales is one area of professional pursuit where intention is everything.  Assertion is key in sales, but it is assertion with a Smiley Face not a grimace.  Of course, salespeople need to have superb peop...

Here we are back with Part Two of the fascinating journey exploring how to use visuals when presenting. Given how straightforward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it. Let's keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing. Graphs are great. They make it visually easy to compare items....

The world's third largest economy and one of the most sophisticated and advancedcountries is a notorious underperformer on the international stage.  I was reminded of that by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. She was a guest speaker at a foreign chamber event,drawing a capacity crowd. She is whip smart, charismatic, and knows how to charm thecrowd. She speaks Arabic fluently and her English is simply e...

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when presenting.  Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation?  What about the visuals?  What is too much?  What is too little?  What is the best way to make this work for me?  Well there are a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning.  What ab...

Japanese people are famous for having learnt over many centuries how to get along with others.  High density living in the modern era and village communal agricultural activities in the past, have both seeded probably the best example of how to have a complex, but low friction society.  Arguments, fights, road rage do occur but compared to anywhere else with such a large population pressure cooker...

The idea of asking questions of buyers during sales calls is actually ancient.  For at least eighty years, we have known this is the most effective way of getting agreements to our offers.  If this key insight has been around for so long, how come there are so few salespeople who have discovered it thus far?  Salespeople in Japan turn up to see clients and launch forth straight into their pitch. T...

We have probably all been on the receiving end of it or have been a witness to it. The presentation is completed, after which come the questions; some are fact finding, some seek clarification, while some are just plain really nasty.   Perhaps the questioner is not trying to be mean, but the result is the same. All eyes in the room burn a hole into you the speaker, as everyone breathlessly waits t...

Sontaku is a Japanese word which means to surmise or conjecture about someone else's feelings or desires.  It is often associated with another Japanese word omotenashi or superb levels of hospitality, for which Japan is rightly famous.  Sontaku means supplying an omotenashi style high level service before the customer has realised they actually need that service – anticipating the customer, based...

"You are who Google says you are" is a quote from Timbo Reid, the host of the "Small Business Big Marketing" podcast which I follow.  His point is people check us out before they meet us, using search engines like Google.  In sales, buyers will also peruse our company website, search us out on Google and probably look us up on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  What are they goin...

If you are called upon at an internal meeting with the big bosses, or during an external public event, to suddenly speak on a topic, do you say, "whoopee, here is my lucky day, it is time for me to shine" or do you find you are suffering from instant whiteout of the brain?  Not being prepared for a presentation at any time is bad.  What about when all those beady eyes are focused on you and you ar...

  "What anchors their behavior is the salaryman's desire to protect himself – no one wants to put their position at risk by telling the truth".  This little gem of an insight was made by a retired nuclear engineer who worked for Toshiba.  He was referring to the various scandals that had taken place there and explaining why illegal decisions made by senior management like cooking the books went un...

Are you failing in sales yourself or do you have sales staff reporting to you who are not making their numbers?  Sales is a brutal, metrics based activity where there are no hiding places or at least none that can be sustained.  Eventually, the numbers show if you are making it or you are not.  What happens then?  In the West, the usual next step is you are fired and a replacement is found.  Japan...