The Japan Business Mastery Show

When we feel fear, our psychological fight or flight response provides energy to our major muscle groups in the chest, arms and legs.  This is great energy to tap, in order to bring our belief and our passion to our messages.  Speakers who look tired, bored or uninterested, are not going to be persuading anyone of anything, ever.  So we should accept that fear is part of the process of public spea...

Here are four principles for helping us all to become better with our clients.   Become genuinely interested in other people Our buyers are actually more interested in what we know about what they want, than in what we know about our product or service.  It is a common mistake though to be wrapped up in the features of our offering and lose focus on the person buying it and what they want.    The...

Your team's introverts never fight for the brainstorming blue marker pen.  They leave it to the extroverts to occupy the white board, the ideas, the airwaves and the debate.  Consequently, we wind up with a shallower harvest of ideas for the organisation.  How do we unleash the full power of these introvert types, who don't bark and don't bite?  This is especially important in Japan where the cult...

The presentations world is still a male bastion in Nippon. Here are some tips and what I have seen work well for businesswomen when speaking in public in Japan.   Confidence is the overwhelming positive first impression. The voice is strong and clear.  Even relatively soft female voices can become powerful enough, through using the microphone technology available today, so there is no excuse for l...

Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information.  After 20 minutes the salesperson stopped the torture.  "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to ask me even one teensy question during this session of our first meeting".    What could he have done with me, rather than telling me all about his product?     He could have asked me a...

There is a tremendous amount of noise buzzing around in the world of business today.  The noisiest portion is the bit going on between our ears, inside our brains.  We are so busy, so immersed in what we are doing, we are forgetting some of the basics.  We are running our lives as a meeting conveyor belt, moving from one topic to the next, multi-tasking like demons on speed.  The upshot is that we...

It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organisation, 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,...

In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing and receiving rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house.  That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – "How to Win Friends and Influence People".  Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work.  Dale Carnegie has definitely joined the circle of establi...

We want people to fail!  That's right, because we all know that we are the product today of all of our accumulated failures.  We have learnt what works and does not work by trying something, failing and then adjusting the way we do things.    Lee Iacocca is famous for how he treated a multi million dollar failure, by one of his marketing executives at Chrysler.  It was no small change and the exec...

How long does it take on average to form a first impression?  My students tell me two seconds.  Wow.  What does this mean for the speaker?  It could be in the boardroom, at the networking event or at the pitch to the client. Regardless of the location, one thing is sure – everyone is a critic.    Think back to the last time you saw someone present. Did the speaker get right into it or was there so...

Four Steps To Understand Buyer's Needs Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information. After 20 minutes he stopped the torture.  "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to ask me even one teensy question during this session of our first meeting".    What could he have done with me?    He could have asked me a few questions to ascertain wh...

In the war for talent, high potential employees are one of any organisation's most valuable resources. They have what it takes to succeed, tackle difficult projects, and eventually function as a leader within your organisation. However, if they are not engaged or properly motivated, they will often times leave in search of more challenging or fulfilling opportunities.   What we don't want to see a...

Six Ways Leaders Can Find Their Voice     Why are so few business leaders good communicators, given all the education they have received, starting at varsity and then later, through their organisations?   Here are six things to work on.     When we speak using a monotone delivery, placing equal stress on each word, regretably, our audience just tunes us out. They start to look for other points of...

It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless salespeople are in Japan.  Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople.  We teach sales for our clients and so we see a very broad gamut of salespeople.  We also buy services and products and so are actively on the receiving end of the sales process.  Well actually that is a blatant exaggeration.  There...

It's inevitable - at some point disagreements are going to come up in the workplace. Power struggles, political plays, sectionalism, siloism – the list goes on regarding sources of organizational conflict.  As we all know, disagreements can get heated quickly and it can be difficult to put aside our opinions and biases in order to handle the situation diplomatically.  Powerfully motivated people o...

Seven Key Things For The Start Of Your Presentation   Question: how long does it take you on average to form a first impression of someone?  My presentation training participants tell me "two seconds". I was thinking, "what does this mean for the speaker?".  It could be in the boardroom, the meeting room, at the networking event, a public presentation or at the pitch to the client. Regardless of t...

What To Do & Not To Do In Sales   He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction.  Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information.  After 20 minutes he stopped the torture.  "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to...

Nine Leadership Lessons For Executives In Japan   As the leader are you coaching your people? I mean really coaching them, not giving orders or balling people out if they come up short or make mistakes. Do you have a methodology for your coaching or are you just thrashing around totally winging it? We are going to look at a structure for coaching your people and add in some human relations princip...

 Three Super Fast Ways To Market Yourself When Networking   Meeting new business contacts, expanding personal networks, promoting a reliable, trustworthy "Brand You" are the basics of business.  Now given our first interactions with strangers are so important, are we getting the best result for ourselves and organisation?  When we are out there representing our company and someone asks us, can we...

Three Important Things to Focus On In Sales   I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc.  The following morsel popped into my inbox one 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 sho...

Eight Ways to Deal With Workplace Idiots   Why, why, why isn't common sense common?  We deal with people in our work lives who do dumb things.  They make stupid decisions which fly full in the face of common sense.  It is such a puzzle.  Why don't they get it, why can't they see the obvious logical answer?    Here are eight considerations for dealing with idiots at work:   The first decision is, a...

Five Steps To Great Storytelling   Best intentions, higher callings, righteousness – all good stuff but without good communication, our efforts fail.  Instinctively, we all know storytelling is a great communication tool, but the word itself is a problem.  We associate it with bedtime stories and therefore the idea sounds a bit childish.   The other problem with storytelling is that we are not ver...

The Five Keys To Creating The Ideal Sales Workplace   Every work environment has elements that drive success and others that hinder progress.   Here are the success drivers;   Best Our Rivals Sales can become very internally focused.  The constant review of sales numbers and focus on existing clients draws us into a web of self-absorption.  Shifting the world into "us" and "them" can be great for...

Seven Checkpoints To Cool Down Your Anger With Idiots   People skills are really one of the key basics of leadership.  Fortunately, leading is easy.  Getting others to follow us is the tricky bit.  I hope this isn't new information, but not everyone is like you, so how do you get the team to follow you?  Especially how to get others, who are so totally different from you, who are "difficult", to f...

Seven Ways To Speak To The Rabble   The Master of Ceremony (MC) goes to the microphone to get the programme underway but the audience are simply oblivious, caught up in their own riveting conversations.  The situation is much worse at receptions where alcohol is already flowing and the people down the back are generating a roar, a positive din, that drowns out the speakers.   Here are seven ideas...