The Japan Business Mastery Show

"Not my Monkeys, Not My Circus". This Polish proverb made me smile.  A handy phrase for whenever the needle on the "ridiculous meter" is hitting red and overloading.  While it serves as a great smarty-pants one-liner, it actually invites some reflection on the difficulty of getting people and teams to work together.  Another great zinger is the "not invented here" attitude of disinterest, when you...

The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. An individual who can present confidently and effectively immediately differentiates themselves from the rest of the group., Here are some practical tips for improving your presentation and communications skills....

Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib salespeople are the scourge of the earth.  They are focused on your money and how to separate you from it.  There are no barriers to entry or qualifications to enter this field of work. Some will tell you anything, they live for today and like a shark, are constantly moving in order to feed.  Snake oil purveyors to the naïve and trusting.    So, how do honest...

"They are looking for a place where they are highly valued, feel they are needed, and are praised for being useful to others".  Professor of Social Psychology at Rissho University in Tokyo, Kimiaki Nishida was quoted in the local media commenting on why young people join terrorist groups like Aum Shinrikyo or the Islamic State.  I was struck by the similarities to the problems confronting Middle M...

It is a big crowd, yet the conversation suddenly dies and a hushed silence now sweeps through the room.  All eyes are fixed forward, as the MC tears at the envelope and announces the award winner.    Receiving the prize, obediently posing for the photographer, our winner turns and begins to move gingerly towards the mike.  In front of everyone, personal and organisational brands now begin to disin...

What we say and how we say it matters.  It matters in life, in families and in business- especially in sales.  Sale's talk is very semantics driven.    Japan presents a challenge with developing salespeople.  Invariably, they are the undereducated graduates of OJT or On-the-Job Training.  If your boss is a great salesperson and a great coach, then well done you.  In Japan, that combination is a ra...

We are all pretty average on recalling events, people's names, locations, sequences, inanimate objects, etc., but we are geniuses on remembering feelings.  We are especially good on how people made us feel and what super memories we have developed in this particular department.    Business is deemed to be logical – cool, balanced, unswerving on the road to greater efficiencies.  Ironically, we are...

Before jumping straight into the slides to build your presentation, identify your likely audience.  How knowledgeable are the attendees on the subject matter?  Are you facing a room full of experts or are they amateurs or a mixture of both?  What are the age ranges and the gender mix?   Next, consider what is the purpose of the speech?  Are you there to pass on relevant information, to inform your...

"Winning is not a sometime thing.  You don't do things right once in a while…you do them right all of the time".  This is a great quote from the famous American football coach Vince Lombardi and we can apply this idea directly to negotiations.  Any business undertaking does better when there is a structure, a process that is capable of creating consistent outcomes.    There are many tactics, strat...

The confidence of the people sitting in your office is up against the confidence of your competitor's people, sitting somewhere else in a similar building.  Are you arming them to win in the market place by instilling greater amounts of confidence in them? Or are you allowing your rivals to beat you by developing more confident people?  Find out why having confident people allows your organisation...

The hush has now swept across the room.  All eyes are fixed on the MC, breaths are being held, awaiting the announcement of this year's winner.  Amazingly, it registers that it is your name they are calling to the stage.  Emotion wells up.  Do you find your mind is experiencing whiteout and goes blank.  Do your nerves suddenly kick in when facing a sea of faces with thousands of eyes boring into y...

We can't control the issues which arise during a negotiation or the attitude of the buyer, but we can control our own skill level and approach.  The more we understand and manage our own behavior, the greater the influence we will have with others.  To be successful we need to behave in a way which influences the interaction by moving it along a collaborative continuum. Good reputation with good i...

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.  Leadership Development ideas have been overtaken by the democratisation of innovation through the internet.  Leaders no longer have a clear monopoly on info...

Hands and legs quivering, knees knocking together, face turning red, pulse racing, mind whiting out – this is stage fright.  Our work responsibilities are rewarded with a salary increase but also the obligation to give reports or speeches.  We are innocently beavering away at our jobs, are recognised for doing well and given promotions or more responsibility.  Tetsuya Miyaki is a typical example. ...

I am sure you have you seen notices explaining that this location is going to close while the building is being reconstructed.   One notice however has become much talked about amongst Japanese retailers.  Toraya are a famous traditional Japanese sweets manufacturer and retailer.  Mr. Mitsuhiro Kurokawa is the 17th generation of his family to lead the business and his "we are rebuilding" notice is...

Japan is entering a scary world of work.  The tried and true assimilation methods of the past, for injecting youth talent into firms, are starting to falter.  Every generation feels a gap with its successor, but the size of the impending chasm in Japan is generating fresh challenges.  Millennials, defined as those becoming adults around 2000.  At different times, it has been poor pickings for Vars...

Seriously sad really.  Our speaker had some excellent points to convey but due to silly basic errors, killed his organisation's messages.  Today there is so much information available, so many role models, so much video instruction, so much access to insight, so much training, you really have to wonder how some organisations can do such a poor job. I approached him after it was all over.  Being th...

The customer is Kamisama (God) in sales in Japan.  We hear this a lot here across all industries and sectors. Sometimes however, the buyer can more like an Oni (Devil) when they deal with salespeople.  Bad behavior is bad behavior regardless of the source, but when you are trying to sell a company on your product or service, do you just have to suck it up?  Actually no! Unless you are in a very sm...

In most Western economies, a colleague's farewell is no big deal, just a part of the tapestry of business.  Managers applying a typical Western business approach to departures in Japan however, may skip the need to communicate with those left behind.  Most Western enterprises are "Dry" rather than "Wet" ecosystems.  Dry meaning logical, ordered, efficient, unemotional, competitive and oriented aro...

There are a number of common structures for giving presentations and one of the most popular is the opening-key points/evidence-closing.  We consider the length of the presentation, the audience, the purpose of our talk and then we pour the contents into this structure.  Generally, in a 30 minute speech we can only have a few key points we can cover, so we select the most powerful and then look fo...

Sales cannot run like a manufacturing production line.  We are not making industrial cheese here.  This is more like an artisanal pursuit, closer to art than science.  Yet, every sales force on the planet has targets which are usually uniform.  Each month, the sales team has to deliver a specified amount of revenue, rolling up into a pre-determined annual target.  The construct may be logical, but...

Sale's solutions are what make the business world thrive.  The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins.  In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins.  Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain's bridge.  The salesperson's role i...

Here are some working habits that we can adopt to minimize worry, fatigue and potential stress induced ill health:   Clear your desk of all papers except those relating to the immediate problem at hand. The reason we have all that paper around us is we are filing it on our desk.  TRAF it instead.   Toss it away.  Whenever I look in my physical files, I always notice that there is a lot of paper wh...