The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Sometimes you see a confident presenter really bomb.  It doesn't happen all that often, but when it does, the contrast is vast.  If they are totally hopeless as their default mode as a speaker and they bomb, well that is understandable.  But a competent presenter bombing shouldn't occur.  It did and I was wondering what did I just see?  Where did our speaker go wrong?  Comedians have this same pro...

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don't.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be absolutely brilliant in this area.  We aren't and so why do we have resultant problems?  Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude. ...

Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately.  Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems?  Is the marketing working?  Are our team becoming more skillful?  Are our leaders effective? These are topics which are super important but also devilish to measure.  Sales however is straightforward – how much did you sell?  Therefore, there is n...

Education can be a barrier to intelligence sometimes.  This is often the case with people educated in very hard skill disciplines.  They are asked to absorb vast amounts of complex information and to follow strict procedural structures.  The rote learning aspect becomes paramount.  This is fine and will get you graduated out of varsity and into the real world.  With so much invested in technical k...

"We all have possibilities we don't know about.  We can do things we don't even dream we can do".  This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future.  Up until the 1920s, fate and God's will were the more common explanations for what would become of us.  Psychology research in the USA began to drive the idea t...

Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work.  We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it.  Buyers though are different.  They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us "no".  The rejection itself is not so much the problem, but how we respond to and deal with the reje...

When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored.  There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well.  It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice.  This is where the majority of lousy, b...

Peter Drucker has this great quote. "Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and under performance.  Everything else requires leadership".  That is a very profound and pithy observation by Drucker.  In this modern day and age, why do we still encounter these three horsemen of the apocalypse of organizational dis-function?  You would think we would be better organiz...

Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous stretch targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment.  We often get into sales by accident.  There are not many varsity business courses in sales.  There is sales training available, provided by companies like ourselves, but often this is not offered by the employer.  The assumption is you look after yourself.  W...

You want to promote your business or organisation, so that you can be more successful.  A genius idea pops up amongst the brain trust over a few drinks after work – why don't we enter the Business Awards?  Someone has to win don't they, so the odds are fair. Anyway, there is no downside is there?  True but there can be, if you don't fully think this through.  I don't mean the requirement for polis...

Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist,  made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society.  He referred to Japan's current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and yaruki (guts).  What does this mean for business and for our companies if we are staffed by young people without these three Ys?  As leaders, how can we reverse this trend and produce more engaged team...

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media.  It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states.  Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business.  A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on "tactics".  This is completely understandable for any transactional based negotia...

Speaking in front of others makes many people tongue tied and nervous.  They struggle to get through a simple presentation, internally, in front of their colleagues.  A public audience is something they would flee from, screaming and waving their hands in the air.  Why is that?  We all learn how to talk.  The presentation is just a talk, so what is the big deal?  Yet, it is a barrier to many peopl...

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don't.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be brilliant in this area.  We aren't and so why do we have problems?    Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude.  We mentally re-run...

Time is of the essence.  Patience is a virtue.  Worthy aims but sometimes we mix these aspirations up in sales.  We are not moving quickly enough and miss the chance.  At other times , we are impatient and we force the issue when we should be more stoic and considered.  We lose on both counts whenever we confuse what we should actually be doing.   Being too slow usually relates to making contact o...

Don't think of a pink elephant.  Did you think of one when you read that sentence?  It shows how easily we can we swayed by images.  If I had said don't think of the letters p-i-n-k-e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, you would have been fabulously successful.  What is the difference – both refer to the same prohibition?  We are very much susceptible to images, yet we rarely use this facility when we are trying to h...

We find it frustrating when we have good ideas or suggestions but all we receive is rejection or even worse criticism of our ideas.  Part of it can be the culture of the organization.  I was listening to some friend's episodes about working life at a major global cosmetics brand, where the culture was purposely made combative.  I laughed when I was told the Meeting Room was called the "Confrontati...

Pushy salespeople are very, very annoying.  They try to bug you into buying and we really don't like it.  We may actually buy, but we don't like them anymore and probably won't become a repeat buyer. Fair enough, but what about when you are the salesperson?  At what point should we give up on convincing the buyer that our solution is the best for them?   It often happens that we meet a potential b...

Know Your Target I was at a speech recently, given by a very prominent  person, an extremely experienced speaker, to a very prestigious audience.  It should have been a triumph, but it was a fizzer. There were two particular problems with the speech.  One was it was set for 25 minutes but the speaker finished in 8 minutes.  The second problem was that the most interesting part of the speech was no...

The disappearance of Executive Assistants and Secretaries reflects the dominance of the keyboard and a DIY approach to work content creation by leaders.  Once upon a time, the majority of boss content output was produced by others, a magical time of delegation ruling the world.  The secretarial pool only lives in the memory of the few or has been briefly glimpsed in black and white movies.  We rep...

A LinkedIn post I read recorded how an American sales guy got off the booze and the client entertainment rat race.  It got a lot of coverage and comment because it obviously struck a chord with many fellow salespeople.  It got me thinking about the same conundrum for those of us selling in Japan.    This is a tricky issue here because, traditionally, so much client entertainment was involved.  "I...

Most talks and presentations we hear, we cannot recall.  Why is that?  We were there presumably because we had an interest. The presenter no doubt made an effort to share something of value with us.  They probably spent hours on their presentation slides and were perhaps somewhat anxious about giving the presentation.  So a lot of nervous energy was expended in the exercise, but with a zero result...

Switching Your Mindset About Putting Things Off We know we should do that project or piece of work but we resist.  We may even be bold and get it into our To Do list, maybe even attach a high priority number to it, but still fail to start.  Why?  We are all pretty clever about avoiding pain and some projects have pain written all over them.  Maybe we may have to think – gasp!  Or maybe, it is goin...

Salespeople don't set the price of what they sell.  This is usually an obscure outcome decided by someone else inside the machine.  It might actually be an elaborate process, where multiple variables are carefully calibrated, mathematical formulae are applied and a price is arrived at.  Or, it might be a slightly moist index finger boldly thrust skyward to come up with a number.  The latter is oft...

Getting up in front of people is confronting for a lot of speakers.  Beady eyes are boring into you, a sea of serious faces is scary, the lights are painfully bright and the pressure feels intense.  You start to doubt your preparation was sufficient for the occasion.  You throw up the laptop lid and then try to mount the podium such that it provides a safety barrier between you and the great unwas...