The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

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...

Anyone presenting in public eye is going to experience fear.  I am a veteran, having done over 500 public speeches and usually I am relaxed about speaking in front of an audience.  But put me in front of an audience of Dale Carnegie High Impact Presentations instructors at a Dale Carnegie international convention, a room positively bristling with presentations expertise and I can tell you I get ne...

Dale Carnegie Training conducted a global survey to examine what are the key people issues organisations are facing.  The research identified three common macro trend areas: Leadership Development, Succession Planning and Employee Engagement.  The results proved to be consistent across organisations, regardless of size, geography or industry.   Leadership Development ideas have been overtaken by t...

We hadn't thought of that or we hadn't planned for that are holy grail of sales.  This is what the client is saying silently to themselves because you have asked a really, really smart question about their business.  Turning up to sell something and turning up to add value are not the same thing.  The real pro salespeople turn up with value from the outset.  They are thinking about the client's bu...

Speaking in front of groups is a learnt skill, except that we don't bother to learn. Oh, so and so is a natural, they have the gift of the gab.  We hear these types of things and imagine that an ability to speak in public is some inherent skill, that we don't possess.  We all learn the skill, except that some start earlier than others.  It doesn't matter, it is never to late to learn and the impro...

Who would have thought we would be seeing the job mobility we are witnessing today in Japan. This is a recent phenomenon and it will become a bigger topic for discussion going forward.  The inability of companies to hire enough young people because of the decline in the youth population will see companies get into bidding wars to grab the talent.  The winners will be those who train their middle m...

There is no doubt that having a solid personal philosophy for how we deal with others is a sound idea.  Few people however bother to develop a personal approach, so they are always floundering around trying to get on better with others.  We are some much more interdependent in business today than we have ever been in the past.  If you are in sales, then your people skills have to be simply excelle...

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 drops away, the voice gradually fades out and there is no clear signal that this is the end.  The narrative arc seems to go missing in action at the final stage and the subsequent silence becomes strained.  It sometimes reminds me of classical music performances,...

If we want to improve we need to change.  We can't keep doing the same things in the same way and expect an improved outcome. Einstein defined that as "crazy". This means we have to institute some behaviour change.  Not easy. If it was easy, none of us would be overweight.  We would all be able to simply alter our lifestyles and become more healthy.  We have to change our thinking about the result...

Nothing happens in business until a sale occurs.  By the way, we are all in sales, whether we know it or not. If we are doing sales properly we are providing an immensely valuable service to our buyers. We are connecting them with goods and services which will help to grow their businesses.  We fail our clients when we are not professional in sales and that means the ability to understand what the...

Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and author of Japan Sales Mastery and we are bringing the show to you from our High Performance Center in Akasaka in Minato-ku, the business center of Tokyo. Well, where is this Cutting Edge?  For all of us, the quality of our people i...