The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

There are billions being spent in the beauty business, the weight loss, fashion and entertainment worlds.  These are the fantasy lands from where we receive our images of success.  By comparison, we are too short, too tall, too skinny, too fat, too poor, too whatever.  Actors, sports stars, captains of industry all seem to be living the dream and we are barely making a living.    If only I had bee...

227: Salespeople Need to Have Self-Awareness Listen well enough to the client's needs.  They miss the key cues, misunderstand the problem, can't override their fixation on what they want and do most of the talking during the sales call.  They wonder why getting an agreement to buy is so hard.   One of my sales coaching students was relating how he took the client meeting into negative territory fr...

This global company is a household name in Japan.   They have spent a fortune getting the brand name known here.   They had some tough times early on too and got a hammering from the media about aspects of their business model.   A lot of negative publicity was generated, so the name is well known, but not in a helpful way.   The President is giving his talk about the company and the industry to a...

If we want to influence others with our visionary leadership, then we have to start with ourselves and clarify what is the vision we have for ourselves.   If we are to live intentionally, we must visualise our objectives in concrete detail, to make the whole process as real as possible.  We also look into our future state and see how we will live.  What sort of person are we to become?  Who are we...

Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sales Team   We hire people and they don't perform as we expected.  The time passes and the numbers are not rolling in.  We thought they would be more proactive and more skilled at getting new business.  We fire them and start over again.  Except that in Japan, you can fire them, but replacing them is a different and difficult matter these days.  Recruit...

We run training on presentations and public speaking continuously. These three requests to be more concise, clear and persuasive, often come up from the participants, regarding the nominated areas where they want to improve.  In this Age of Distraction, if you miss the first two, you can kiss goodbye to number three.  As soon as an audience hears you rambling, they are scrambling for the mobile ph...

Leaders gain automatic trust by dint of their position power.  Title and authority ensure people will toe the line, laugh at our jokes, tell us "Yes".  This type of trust only goes so far though in gaining the willing cooperation of the team members.  In a busy life however, with so many demands on our time, we mentally merge automatic trust with earned trust and confuse the two.  Earned trust dif...

Selling dull stuff is, well, dull.  We are supposed to be enthused about our widget but what if it doesn't generate all that much enthusiasm in us?    Industrial products are rarely sexy.  They tend to be very technical, specification heavy and chunky.  They are normally being presented in a catalogue of products. The pricing, quality and the after sales service tends to be the differentiator with...

Speakers are under assault.  Mobile phones tempt audiences to escape us to the internet and before you now it we have lost our audience to our message.  Putting people to sleep by the way we deliver our talk is unforgiveable.   Normally we expect Japanese speakers to be boring, because their language is a monotone and so they apply the same formula when speaking in either Japanese or English.  Tha...

As leaders in Japan, one of our biggest fears is ignorance.  We may come up with a genius idea that is actually rubbish.  The age, stage and power hierarchy here ensures no one wants to stand out by "speaking truth to power".  Subordinates learn quickly that taking personal responsibility for anything is a risky business.  Better to make it a group decision, so that the blame evaporates and never...

The sales process is a process with different phases and stages.  The skilled salesperson knows how to navigate their way through these phases in the conversation with the buyer.   We have a defined sales cycle in our interactions with our clients.  We build the trust, ask the key questions to understand need, present the solution, deal with pushback and ask for the business.  Of course, there is...

There are so many competitors for our audience's attention today.  The last thing we need are "own goals" by letting the slide deck or the video steal our thunder.  We must be the dominator on stage not the dominated.    There is no question visuals are super powerful in presentations.  This can range from your eye contact, body language and gestures all the way up to actual live fireworks.  Think...

We cannot stop remembering the past.  We cannot stop thinking about the future.  We learn from the past, good and bad and we prepare for the future, before it arrives.  These are survival mechanisms the species has mastered.  We can strip out the worry bits of those two activities and then life looks a lot different.   Motivational quotes are everywhere and they remind us of useful things we alrea...

We often see presenters elevated up on stage or positioned at the front of the room, flanked by or under a screen, and protected from the audience by a rostrum.  In Japan standing above your seated audience requires an apology for doing so at the start of the speech.  This is a very hierarchy conscious society, so implying your superiority to your audience, through your physical positioning has to...

Change happens slowly in Japan.  Getting more women into leadership positions requires a lot of other moving parts to kick in.  One of them is changing the mindset of male line managers regarding who to select to go to company training.   Discrimination against women in business in Japan takes many forms.  Previous Pime Minister Abe talked about targets for women in leadership positions in compani...

 We rush about chasing deals.  We nail one down and race off hunting for the next one.  Sometimes we need to switch from hunter to farmer and see if there is more to that first deal. We need to keep an eye on the satisfaction the buyer has with the first deal, to see if we can cross sell, upsell or get a referral.   The sales agreement is followed by the delivery of the product or service.  In som...

If we don't grab their attention and interest, then our message is lost to them as they head off to the internet.    "The good is the enemy of the great" is a clever saying and very true.  In presenting terms we can have people who are competent but not even close to maximising their potential.  They are sitting there in the lukewarm bath, never experiencing or understanding the joys of an extra t...

Japan has a very efficient education system around the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.  There was an effort to bridge the creativity gap with other countries but that was abandoned.  Where are we with the gap between what industry needs and what the education system is producing?    Japanese education includes exciting things like adults screaming abuse, using threatening words, kids mo...

We usually think in terms of cultural differences with the West, when we are dealing with this unique country, Japan.  In fact, personality style differences of the buyer are much more important in business.  Cultural factors form a base and on top of that are the idiosyncratic differences between Japanese buyers and ourselves.  This becomes very key in communication terms.  We won't be changing o...

There are many things which impact an entrepreneurs success.    Usually, when we think about how to succeed in our own business, we favour things like sufficient cash flow and capital.  This is absolutely true, but this is a product of decisions we have already taken.  We need to focus on the core drivers of the company's success.  There will be certain businesses where technology alone makes it w...

Understanding the basics of Japanese business requires we have to know about nemawashi and what it means for us.   Nemawashi is a very important word in Japanese.  It is made up of two words "ne" which means root and "mawashi" which means to wrap around.  Or wrapping up the root. A good translation however is "groundwork", usually associated with a decision or a meeting.  In Japan they can move 15...

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting.  Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my slide deck for my key note presentation?  What's too much?  What's too little?  What's the best way to make this work for me?     Here's some guidelines for using visuals. Sometimes less is definitely best.  On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs. ...

The playbook on how to deal with difficult people wasn't anywhere in sight throughout our entire schooling.  When we went to work this playbook was also missing from the induction training and from every other piece of training we have ever received.    Sadly, not everyone is like us – wonderful, charming, amusing, attractive.  Despite our best efforts to be a role model of perfection, setting the...

Emperors and fishmongers.  The opposite end of the social spectrum, but in Japan, I discovered the levels of formality in meetings was unnervingly similar.  Formality in Japan is linked very closely to what is perceived as being polite.  European countries may feel more familiar with Japanese style formality, but for countries like the US, Australia, Canada etc., this level of formality is not the...

Storytelling by the speaker combined with audience participation is a winner.  We shouldn't go crazy and over do it of course, but we definitely should use this technique.   Whenever I am in the USA, I love watching the different television preachers in action.  I am not looking for salvation particularly, but I am looking for hints on how to work an audience.  Now obviously competing with their p...