The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time.  It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees.  After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign.  The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him.  He was knowledgeable on his subject having...

All interfaces with the customer are designed by people.  It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ.  The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation.  That culture is the accountability of senior management.  The common success point of organisations is to hav...

The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There...

Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers.  They bring focus to key points we want to get across.  They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged.  They also have danger within them.  Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn't be done on the fly.  If you want to get...

We love acronyms!  Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes.  They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes.  It always good to have evidence around pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based...

Projects are too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don't approach them properly.  We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach.  We certainly don't apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechani...

Zen study is a way to strip out all of the non-essentials in life.  The noise, the distraction, the things that are not so important.  People sit around concentrating on their breath cycle or one word or any number of other methods to quiet the mind. They are seeking to get more clarity about themselves and what are their real priorities.  As presenters, this is a good metaphor for when we are in...

Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them.  It isn't usually that we don't know what to do, it is that we don't actually do it.  We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails,  without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved....

Great service is so fleeting and  illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone.  One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude.  Good service...

I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses.  Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate.   Stepping on to the floor The dojo is the ultimate equalizer.  Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks's mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from every...

Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client's company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don't get to talk to the boss.  They won't tell you their name, they don't offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is "get lost".  If you don't know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will que...

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field.  He has so...

Focus is under constant attack.  The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor.  Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable.  That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics.  The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team.  The vision o...

Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn't it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale?  This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don't...

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear i...

For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear...

Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore.  Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts.  Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it.  A nerdy lovefest on the specs, so to speak. Today there are broader s...

Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications.  Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer.  We can't control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of producing revenue results, with bosses always pushing hard on th...

  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 a different case.  They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us "no".  The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we deal w...

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...

We don't get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren't where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project.   These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly p...

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience.  What makes the difference?  The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner.  Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life.  We see this with music.  The same lyrics, but with a different arrangement and s...

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...

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets.  In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client's best interests.  We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer's needs.  We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that...

It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organization, to the client or to a larger audience.  The energy often quickly drops away, the voice just fades right out and there is no clear signal that this is the end.  The audience is unsure whether to applaud or if there is more coming.  Everyone is stuck in limbo wondering what to do next.  The narrative arc seems to go miss...