The Presentations Japan Series

When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal.  Instead, I plan the training down to the last second.  I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the...

Many Japanese companies have expanded their operations outside of Japan to enlarge their business, as the population decline guarantees to keep shrinking the domestic market.  Many multi-national companies have established a strong presence on the ground here, because they like the rule of law and freedom to conduct their business, without having to hand over their IP to domestic partners.  One of...

I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age.  I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed.  My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such...

Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,  is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend.  I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation level of another great presentation is high.  I am not alone in thinking like this and his talks are always packed. This underlines why being able to present at a professional level builds your person...

We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers.  We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk.  We automatically revert to the brain when we start this exercise.  Our logical, rational, analytical mode is needed but that is not enough for audiences.  We need heart, value and sex appeal for our messages to resonate.  We tend however to get...

Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about.  The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they may have asked us to speak on a particular topic.  We are busy and often we start with creating new slides and scanning previous presentations for slides we can recycle.  This is a poor strategy.  What d...

The end is near.  The end of Covid that is, as we see vaccinations increase and get us all closer to herd immunity.  When will it end?  There probably will never be an exact end, but it will diminish and our lives will get back to something approaching normality.  That means we will be back in the meeting rooms and speaking venues to give our talks to live audiences.  We have gotten used to online...

246: How to be a Star in Business Interviews Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment.  These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business.  More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts.  I have been on b...

One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates.  Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating.  Often the issue is how the topic is approached.  In this "time is money", no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scrambl...

Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders.  I know this because the same requests keep coming up.  This is across industries and companies and it is consistent.  Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information.  They can really pack a lot into a few slides.  When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, w...

Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other.  We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference?  Surprisingly, not as much as we expected.  The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because...

"Naomi Osaka would have earned at least $200,000 dollars if she made the Top 16 in the French Tennis Open and would have had a $1.7million payday, if she won the tournament. Speaking to the media after each round, is why she gets paid the big bucks, so she should harden up and get to work".   Some other commentators have focused on her "bravery to talk about her mental depression and her decision...

Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple.  You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk.  I don't know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom.  That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic.  Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge.  Either we do it fre...

Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells.  We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people.  Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference.  The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue.  The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely...

English versus mathematics?  Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University.  Science is logical, knowable, understandable.  Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided.  Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers.  These days clients want to talk to the engineers,...

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings.  Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic.  When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium.  In many cases they were disparate individua...

"That has to come out".  "Why?".  "It might offend women in the audience".  "But this example is totally in context with what I am saying".  And so it went on.  This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture.  Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America.  Until now.  The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go glo...

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world's biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. It was a good crowd.  Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded.  The talk was on how to project your brand "within" this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot greasy pole.  Before we s...

This is horrible.  Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking?  I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation's finances and he is doing a woeful job of it.  They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass?  I was also thinking, "you should have called me, I cou...

There are 13 common mistakes which prevent presenters from owning the room. Here they are - don't do these things!   Thump the microphone and ask if people can hear you down the back - get there early and check the tech   Have no idea who is in the audience. Find out the experience and expertise level of the audience, so you are not pitching too high or too low with your content   Plan the present...

Succeeding Shintaro Abe as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga has now been thrust into the public arena in a new dimension.  When he was the Cabinet spokesman, he made a valiant effort to say as little as possible at press briefings, be defensive and always treat journalists with complete disdain and disregard.  He didn't need to be appealing or a good speaker, because his job was to look down the who...

It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain.  As someone wise once noted, "if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what".  Presenting is something similar.  Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill.  In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first...

I was watching an "expert" giving a series of video instruction modules on leading dispersed teams, now that many of us are working from home.  I thought this will be useful and maybe I can pick up a few ideas for myself.  It was a rather pedestrian affair I have to say and in one part, dangerously incorrect.  The instructor claims to have a Ph. D., so presumably has done some major original resea...

When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that " a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention" I thought about its ramifications for presenters.  Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon's dystopian prophecy has come to fruition.  This is the Age of Distraction for audiences.  They are gold medal winning poor listen...

The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a n...