The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

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...

Japan is a big small place.  It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area.  We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England.  This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine.  England has these too, but I think Japan...

In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on.  One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don't rehearse.  They just turn up and fluff it.  They blow up...

  The Question and Answer component of talks are a fixture that we don't normally analyse for structure possibilities. Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence.  When we are planning the talk though, we may just neglect to factor this Q&A element into our planning. We may have considered what some potential questions might be, so that we are pr...

During the "bubble years" of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for th...

We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc.  We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer.  Next, they want to negotiate the price.  Do we see the connection here, between our sales approach and the result, the entire catastrophe?  The reality is often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their posi...

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important.  We often do this by sharing our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully.  When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing the attention of our audience. They are like greased lightening when...

Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies.  The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 Japanese students venturing off-shore.  This dropped to a low of 57,500 in 2011 and since that point has climbed back above 60,000.  Just to put that in context, Korea has over 117,000 students studying...

Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don't know.  Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure.  This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business.  There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk.   There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced.  Pers...

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university.  It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head-to-head in a public setting.  I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit.  If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory...

Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history.  Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm.  It accompanies us on life's journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go.  We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often at home on our own a few days a week or in noisy, distracting open plan environments.  We are a...

The release of 5G or fifth generation mobile networks was launched in Japan in March 2020. Our old phones ran on a 4G standard and 5G faster is significantly faster than 4G.  So what does that mean for salespeople across all industries? The capacity to upload heavier files, to be sent at lightening speed, grabs your attention.  What are some of the heaviest files at the moment?  Video!  YouTube is...

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking.  Let me put it on the table. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound.  People here talk about a "Japanese style" of doing public talks.  This is their excuse for not being at the global standard for communication...

The Spa magazine in Japan previously released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs.  The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. Salaries are a function of deflation and commercial success, as well as the...

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off.  However, these industries and i...

 Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc.  The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care –Anonymous".  Wow!  What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorica...