The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

The new Japanese financial year has already started now and I hope that last year's results went well for you.  The reason I do this show is to help as many people as possible improve in the areas of leadership, sales and persuasion power.  I hope it is helping and if it is, then please leave me some comments. Today we are talking about how to be the authentic you when you give presentations.  Tha...

Have you enjoyed a hanami or cherry blossom flower viewing party this year.  One of the great Japanese traditions I have to say. Today we are talking about when the system fails you, what do you do?  Creativity isn't part of the Japanese education system and how to think is being replaced with how to do.  We need innovation though and we need creative people.  Today we are going to look at what we...

happy sight . Our office location in Akasaka is a good one because the streets around here are full of trees in full bloom and it is really a magic time to be in Japan. If you haven't experienced it yet, come and do so!  Today we are talking about if we want to make a sale, we had better be talking value rather than getting dragged down into the mud and blood of pricing discussions. Great Greg, yo...

If you are in Tokyo, are you enjoying the early flowering cherry blossoms yet?  A fantastic pink canvas is heading our way. Today we are talking about in this Age of Distraction you have two seconds to establish a positive first impression as a speaker.  Don't leave this to random chance.  Plan to establish authority and credibility with your audience in that vital initial window.  Today we look a...

How is everyone's kafunsho or allergies to the cedar and cypress pine  tree pollens going?  Don't worry, I am suffering with you if you belong to roughly half the population here in Tokyo who are affected.  Today we are talking about how people in Japan are not connecting very well these days.  They are not connecting to find life partners and have children and not doing a great job in business ei...

Well this is the time everyone is driving their results over the line, with the approaching financial year end looming on the horizon.  I hope it is all on track!  Today we are talking about do we really have a clear idea about the first impressions we are providing for our customers.  Are the support teams delivering services after the sale, really reinforcing the brand and the customer's commitm...

We hear a lot about the current age of disruption but it is also the age of distraction.  If you are a speaker, then today's miniscule attention span problem on the part of your audience is definitely a big problem.  How can we speak in a way that keeps the audience with us and off their phones and escaping to the charms of the internet?  We need to look at our speech forensically. Breaking it dow...

Boss positions over others are often the last refuge of insecure people.  They are like little Napoleons, bossing everyone around, flaunting their status power.  They don't have great personal ability but they do have authority and they like to use it. They have worked out that fear is a great tool to use on others to keep themselves in control of the work situation.  This is a flawed model and th...

Negotiating is one of the dark arts isn't it.  The problem for most of us is that we usually spend very little of our time actually doing any serious negotiations in business.  The majority of the time, people agree to what we are proposing or they ask us for relatively minor modifications to our offer and we accommodate them.  Hard core negotiations are few and far between in everyday business fo...

Urban myths usually spring from a scintilla of truth and then morph into something unrecognizable from the original.  I am sure Professor Mehrabian is mystified how his original research has been corrupted, to say something he never claimed.  We hear these things trotted out by people who actually don't know what they are talking about.  In the presentation's world there are a large number of thes...

We all know first impressions are so important and so hard to unwind.  Well given we know that, why are we so hit and miss with the process of forming first impressions.  In customer service, the first thing seen should be a big, warm, sincere smile.  But is this happening?  It could be a big smile in the voice over the phone or in person, face to face. Leaders are often terrible hypocrites. They...

Quotas, budgets, targets, feared employment oblivion all drive salespeople toward making sales.  Some go for the whales, but often don't even get a minnow. Others grab everything they can get.  The focus tends to be on getting that sale, bringing some money in the door, getting some commission, keeping your job.  The issue with this though is it corrupts our salesperson horizon.  It makes it too p...

Okay, I have a presentation to give, so which slides can I use?  Bad idea.  This is the last thing you should be doing, in terms of preparing for your talk.  You have the topic, but who will be in the audience and what level of familiarity will they have with your topic?  Start with the end!  Go straight to the design of your key punch line, your biggest takeaway, the one thing you want to audienc...

Every culture has their work rhythm.  Some are a start early, go home early preference, the mainstream is probably more a nine to five approach and Japan has its late evening finish.  There are big variations according to the climate. Slugging it out through the heat of summer in my native Brisbane is debilitating because the heat drains you of your energy.  Winter in Tokyo achieves the same feat,...

Getting buyers to hand over their hard won cash is a daunting task in many ways.  We salespeople love a challenge though, so we often conspire to make it harder than it has to be, by killing the opportunity in front of us.  Semantics is a critical study area for salespeople, because how we say things makes such a huge difference.  There are ways of framing questions and making statements that work...

Mindset is a big deal in sports.  We understand that it is important in business too, but we sometimes miss the point that it also applies to how we approach public speaking.  We can exude confidence or terror.  Either way the audience will buy what we are selling. How do we exude confidence?  This comes back to our basic beliefs about ourselves as a speaker, which then determine the mindsets of "...

 Modern life is full of contradictions.  We have vast computing power in the palms of our hands. Yet, some choose to play mindless games on their device.  Others are busily scrolling through the detritus of other people social media postings. Observations like "Oh look at what that cat is doing!" needlessly cloud our brains.  Yet we are busy, aren't we.  We are actually more than busy, in fact, we...

We have been requested to give a talk, so where should we start?  Should we jump straight into pulling together all the slides for the presentation?  Absolutely not.  We need to prepare this talk so it will be a  success. The first important question we must ask is who are we going to be talking to?  The next question is about the purpose of the talk.  Is it to educate, impress, motivate or to ent...

We all want to go to heaven, but none of us want to die.  We all want change, but we don't want to change.  These are some of the typical contradictions we find in human society. Another one concerns the messy process of innovation.  In Japan, which is a highly risk averse culture, there is a strong contradiction at play here.  Not tolerating mistakes but expecting innovation from our people are c...

 Sales is a difficult world, but there are certain environments which lend themselves more toward making salespeople successful. If we are allowed to flourish, the chances are high that we will maximize our opportunities.  Focusing outward on the competition is much better than having salespeople squabbling amongst themselves over commission splits or who owns the client.  Giving salespeople enorm...

When you are under the spotlight in business you have to shine.  Yet, so often, we see people catapulted to the top as an award winner and they do a dreadful job with their acceptance speech.  You really have to wonder why that is?  They entered the contest so they must have at least expected there was a chance of winning.  If that did happen, then they know they will be invited to the stage to re...

Honey works better than vinegar in attracting people and their cooperation.  We know that, so why do we forget this at work.  We are short with people and too much occupied with our immense status and authority.  This is all vinegar. Others are not attracted to this approach.  We need to work on our people skills if we want to have influence and get cooperation.  How do we do that? Welcome back to...

Unrequested contacts are frowned upon in Japan.  Direct mail goes straight in the bin. Emails from unknowns are deleted. Incoming phone calls are neglected and never called back.  This is grossly unfair you might be thinking.  You might also be thinking that cold calling is a dead duck in Japan. Well that is not the case.  Cold calling always has a relatively low hit rate but there are occasions w...

We live in a micro attention span world.  We are also becoming more and more self centered around what we want and why we need to have it right now.  A lot of the older courtesies and societal manners are perishing by the wayside.  We might be that person standing up there on stage surveying a crowd full of self important, totally preoccupied people who would rather hear the sound of their own voi...

Cooperation is a key request within organisations.  Within small teams it tends to work well but it gets more challenging when you are trying to get other sections or divisions to cooperate with you. This is where our people skills come into it.  We need to know what are the communication approaches which will have the highest propensity for success in getting cooperation from others? Often these...