The Japan Business Mastery Show

Don't think of a pink elephant.  Did you think of one when you read that sentence?  It shows how easily we can we swayed by images.  If I had said don't think of the letters p-i-n-k-e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, you would have been fabulously successful.  What is the difference – both refer to the same prohibition?  We are very much susceptible to images, yet we rarely use this facility when we are trying to h...

Time is of the essence.  Patience is a virtue.  Worthy aims but sometimes we mix these aspirations up in sales.  We are not moving quickly enough and miss the chance.  At other times , we are impatient and we force the issue when we should be more stoic and considered.  We lose on both counts whenever we confuse what we should actually be doing. Being too slow usually relates to making contact or...

Beginning your talk in Japan with a series of apologies is standard practice.  First apologise for speaking while standing, because you are towering above your audience implying superiority.  Next, tell us how nervous you are about speaking to such a distinguished audience.  Don't forget to mention you had no time to prepare the talk properly because you have been so busy.  If you are sick, it is...

Sport is a popular source of inspiration for corporate leadership.  Coaches attend off-sites and make good money telling executives how to be better motivators.  Sports journalist Simon Kuper made an interesting observation in one of his columns in the Financial Times about famous football coaches falling into decline, supplanted by younger, more innovative rivals. These superstar coaches were the...

I was at a speech recently, given by a very prominent  person, an extremely experienced speaker, to a very prestigious audience.  There were two particular problems with the speech.  One was it was set for 25 minutes but the speaker finished in 8 minutes.  The second problem was that the most interesting part of the speech was not readily accessible for the audience.  Both issues stemmed from a la...

"I gave my liver for my company" is a common refrain amongst Japanese salespeople.  The other one is "I gave up my weekends for golf with the client".  What about foreigners selling here?  Do we have to donate our liver to the cause and get divorced, because we are never spending any time with the family? There is a difference between bribing the buyer through entertainment and having a business r...

It sounds so obvious that we should have structures for doing our project planning.  However, the project team jumps straight into arranging the details of the project, without giving any thought to how the project should be approached. There are eight steps we can consider when we begin working on a project.  Step 1: Define what is the "should be".  This is the project scope and must be in harmon...

Salespeople don't set the price of what they sell.  This is usually an obscure outcome decided by someone else inside the machine.  It might actually be an elaborate process, where multiple variables are carefully calibrated, mathematical formulae are applied and a price is arrived at.  Or, it might be a slightly moist index finger boldly thrust skyward to come up with a number.  The latter is oft...

Project leadership is a task most leaders are never properly trained to perform and so the results are often underwhelming.    Projects are too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don't approach them properly.  We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professiona...

We all know that consistency is a fundamental requirement if we are going to establish trust with others.  We ask buyers to purchase from us on the basis that we will be delivering what we say we will deliver, on time, at the agreed price point and quality.    Saying you are reliable and trustworthy is hot air, until you prove it.  Obviously once we get the order and deliver we are in a position t...

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don't.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be brilliant in this area.  We aren't and so why do we have problems?    Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude.  We mentally re-run...

Getting up in front of people is confronting for a lot of speakers.  Beady eyes are boring into you, a sea of serious faces is scary, the lights are painfully bright and the pressure feels intense.  You studiously avoid confronting eye contact, by staring down at your laptop screen or your notes.  Or to leaven things up, you read the screen to the audience.   By properly designing your presentatio...

Three woeful contributions from salespeople include "we have this widget", "you should have it?" and "we can discount the price".  What a mess right there.  Yet, left to their own devices, this is the type of nonsense salespeople say to clients.  Serving the client's best interests is job one for salespeople, so why aren't they having a proper conversation with the buyer?     They are untrained, u...

 "We all have possibilities we don't know about.  We can do things we don't even dream we can do".  This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future.  Up until the 1920s, fate and God's will were the more common explanations for what would become of us.  Psychology studies in the USA began to drive the idea t...

Every performance is better when practiced beforehand and presenting is no different.  We are putting ourselves out there when we present, so don't miss it, there is a lot on the line.  We need to ensure we are a triumph rather than a joke.  The way to do that is to practice beforehand.  How do we do that, what are some best practices to help us?   We need to design the whole presentation.  We nee...

Cold calling is an unheralded intervention into someone's already packed schedule.  They are distracted by the phone from what they were concentrating on, so they are automatically annoyed.  They are time conscious because this call was not planned.  The person calling them is an unknown quantity, so the trust factor is zero or less.  They have been cold called by idiots in the past, who say dumb...

Peter Drucker has this great quote. "Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and under performance.  Everything else requires leadership".  In this modern day and age, why do still encounter these three horseman of the apocalypse of organizational dis-function?  Each signals its own raft of challenges, magnified even further when operating in Japan.    Friction is...

How should we reproduce the content we have designed for our talk?  Do we have to remember it exactly, memorise it so we can be faithful to our speech design and message? If it is a very short speech, you can try and memorise it, but these are usually very special occasions.  Japan is a very formal country, so if you are asked to speak at a friend or subordinate's wedding here, then there are esta...

It always astonishes me that many salespeople have very little sense of proper timing to start selling their product or service.  In the sales call, they are in a rush to get down to business.  Japan has mastered the idea of building some rapport before starting the sales conversation.  Small talk predominates at the commencement of the meeting and then smoothly glides into the main discussion.  W...

We find it frustrating when we have good ideas or suggestions but all we receive is rejection or even worse criticism of our ideas.  Part of it can be the culture of the organization.  When someone savages our contribution they cancel our idea creation ticket right there.  However my crazy, unworkable, ridiculous, stupid idea might be tweaked by you into something really valuable.  Without my nutt...

Formulistic presentations tick the boxes, but don't ignite much enthusiasm in the audience.  The things that go missing are often passion and commitment about the topic.  Additionally, it may be an already low energy, flat delivery is further hindered by a poor structure.  We enter a room full of pre-occupied people, with microscopic attention spans, basically entirely distracted before we start. ...

I am a buyer too and am constantly amazed by what some people get up to.  They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named "process of elimination". You don't like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam ? I want "blue" but they keep showing me 50 shades of "pink".    Let's improve our approach. There is a great Japanese word, which should be embra...

Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist,  made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society.  He referred to Japan's current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and yaruki (guts).  What does this mean for business and for our companies if we are staffed by young people without these three Ys?  As leaders, how can we reverse this trend and produce more engaged team...

Listen to our most popular episode in sales for The Japan Business Mastery Show!   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...

The legal profession is one of the last holdouts, still clinging to the misguided belief that being smart equals getting the client's business.  Big mistake.   Lawyers have spent a lot of time studying to pass their bar exams.  When they graduate, they are the white collar galley slaves, shackled to legal partner's teams, doing the grunt work for years, until they can be allowed on deck.  As they...