The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

My regular Rotary meeting held every week at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has a featured speaker.   Our speaker this time was a celebrity in his eighties and very well known to the audience.  Rotary runs like clockwork and every section of the hourly meeting is choreographed and the meetings always finish on time. Not this time though.  Our speaker gave a rambling talk, which seemed to lack any dir...

How do you run your business.  Sharp on the cost control, right on top of the quality, working hard on building the brand, watchful of competitors, full throttle on appealing to shareholders and stakeholders?  There is one area that is going to become a bigger headache. That is people.   I am not talking about just training them. I am hearing from leaders in Japan that they are growing more concer...

If you meet any salesperson who doesn't ask you questions before explaining their widget run!  This person is not a professional in sales, so don't bother talking with them because you should only deal with professionals in any business and sales is no exception.   Salespeople in their forties, who have been selling their whole careers are professional salespeople.  They are not Johnny Come Lately...

The podium is a powerful place for powerful ideas.  The audience has no idea what you are going to say and where you are going to take them during your presentation.  In Japan, at least, they will politely hear you out until the end and then perhaps offer up a question or two.  For the thirty or forty minutes allotted to you, you are the master of the universe, omnipotent over all seated before yo...

The younger generation are the future and they want a different type of boss.  That boss has to be a new model - persuasive, able to sell the WHY of the job, razor focused on building the team member's careers, a brilliant communicator and personal coach.  A snap really – probably be able to knock that lot off before lunch.  Well maybe not.   In Japan, they are not making as many members of the yo...

Brain fog can hit salespeople when they hear a buying objection from the client.  As soon as they recover, they spring into action.  Usually, it is the wrong action. It involves arguing with the client about why this isn't a reason not to buy.  This effort goes nowhere and is a complete waste of time.  In today's episode find out what we should be doing.   Getting pushback, rejection, disinterest...

Our mental approach to our activities determines our success.  We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point.  In fact, when it comes to presenting in front of other people we often have a negative mindset about the activity.  We may be reliving humiliations from elementary school or high school, when we had to make a...

Are you moody? You might say no. You see yourself as an upbeat individual, smoothly navigating your way through the workday. Good, but the workplace is roiling with confirmed, card carrying boss watchers. They have their antennae out every time you appear, as they gauge the risk level of any interaction with you today.   Should I raise that project possibility, talk about the budget, have that rev...

Marketing plays a key role in generating leads.  They are trying to maximise the accuracy of the segmentation of the data base, to make offers that resonate specifically with different segments.  They are producing content marketing pieces that will spark leads through the SEO route.  Buying ad words to get pay per click activation from buyers, who are searching for your specific good or service i...

We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations.  We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it.  It was a lot of effort for a one time event.  It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art Sunae , where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and d...

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...