The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

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...

Tricky negotiators are losers.  They can only survive in a one shot business, because people won't want to deal with them again.  Most of us in business are looking for lifetime, continuous, consistent buying activities from our clients.  We may get involved in one-off deals, but that isn't what we are looking for.  We want year in year out buying, we want a solid relationship of trust and give an...

 I absolutely hated the prospect of public speaking. In fact, I was a whimp and ran away from every chance I had to speak in public.  Careers are funny things, because at some stage you get to a point where you can't run away from speaking to groups anymore. Now you would think that logically, I would have worked that out a lot earlier and prepared myself for the eventuality of having to speak in...

The classic brutalist image of a departure from the firm is from the finance industry. The departee is handed a garbage bag to collect their chattels and are unceremoniously stripped of their entry badges and marched out of the building by security.  No one is told anything and no explanations are given.  When I was studying Chinese politics at Griffith University, I remember that Chinese Communis...

We rarely meet super pro negotiators in business.  Often the other side are just like us, rank amateurs.   Because we are just turning up to negotiate, we are often at a disadvantage because we don't really know what we are doing.  We also don't do it on a regular basis either, so the frequency gaps between actual hard edged negotiations can be quite long. If we were doing them every day, we would...

When we represent our organization in a public venue delivering a talk there are two brands on display.  Our companies brand, because everyone will make a judgment about the entire organisation based on what they see us do.  The second brand is our personal brand, how professional we are.  If we are ever in a position to give a public presentation, we need to be very conscious we need to be doing...

What are you like on creating first impressions with people you meet for the first time? We are all aware that establishing "know, like and trust" relationships with clients are three key ingredients for success in business.  What about the like and trust bits?  The formation of first impressions in business has become so microscopically short today, we really need to have these well thought throu...

We are only down to a few seconds today, when we start a talk before the audience decides their phones are more interesting than we are and they escape from us to the internet and social media.  We need to plan our talks well to grab attention and maintain it throughout the talk. The job of a speaker has never been harder than it is today because the distraction rate is so high and the attention r...

Middle Managers are going to be the leadership group most directly interacting with the younger generation of employees.  We are on the cusp of entering the first ever free agent era of workers in Japanese history, as the population decline ensures that the young are in super demand. The people who are going to ensure they stay with you rather than leave for the rival's firm will be your middle ma...

Customer service is a crowded field, with so many consumer products and services duking it out for survival.  How do you stay in operation and how do you sustain that over hundreds of years?  The thinking behind how you regard your customers is going to be paramount to consistent success.  How do you demonstrate that philosophy toward your customers?  Here is a classic example of how to stand out...

It is a fine line we have to tread.  We want to be supplying data etc as evidence to support what we are saying.  However, there is the danger that the data overwhelms the point we are trying to make.  It can also become a distraction from us, as everyone focuses on the screen and we disappear.  We need to be the center piece and we need to make the data our servant rather than the other way aroun...

Maya Angelou noted, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel".  Quite true isn't it but recognizing something is true and actually conducting yourself along those tenets are quite different things.  So on reflection, thinking about your daily interactions, how do you make people feel? Welcome back to t...

The Buyer is God not King in Japan and that difference is huge here.  There are so many cases of buyers treating sellers like dirt. The top prize has to go to the pharma industry dealing with haughty, arrogant doctors.  There are other cases though where you persuade the President of something but you find the staff undermine the decision or just ignore it, because you went over their heads.  Anot...

Should the business presentations world be a democracy where anyone can speak?  Actually no.  Who wants to sit there and be hammered boring, unprofessional, dismal speakers?  What we really want is for our time to be well spent.  To be enlightened, motivated, inspired, informed.  There are some prerequisites for speakers in this regard and they all have to do with the motivation behind speaking. ...

Our collective level of confidence can make a huge difference in the workplace.  If we are prepared to try things, we will learn more and faster.  Naturally, not everything will work, there will be mistakes, problems and failures along the way. The difficulty in Japan is that failure and mistakes are not embraced but avoided.  The learning process from failure is truncated.  Part of the problem is...

Sales is an emotional roller coaster.  It is also a roller coaster of results.  We have sales rolling in and we think this is great.  We are kept super busy servicing the deals we have struck.  Then it happens, we run out of gas.  Suddenly, there are no sales coming in and we have to race around trying to stoke the fire to get something happening.  This is the valley between the peaks of productio...