The Presentations Japan Series

When we are giving a public presentation, it is rare that we will be given carte blanche by the organisers to promote our product or service.  That type of blatant self-promotion is frowned upon and your reputation in the market will be negatively impacted.  Great, but I want to sell more stuff.  How can we promote ourselves without seeming to be breaking the boundaries of common sense?  The hero'...

This last week I saw two speakers who were presenting, but both managed to do so with absolutely no presence.  They could not command the room and they were both hard to hear.  One was hosting an event with experts assembled, there to gain more knowledge.  The other was leading the opening of a prestigious event to a very large audience in a big ballroom. I don't think there was any great self-awa...

The best personal branding is to say something useful and interesting in a compelling , professional way.  That is a snap right?  Maybe not.  What constitutes useful and interesting will vary, depending in who is in the audience.  If we pitch the content complexity too high, we may be over the heads of our audience. They will take nothing away, because they are lost and they will hate us for makin...

"Greg is all style and no substance", my erstwhile colleague happily told everyone who would listen, while I was on stage.  It was an occasion where each Division Head presented to the entire company on what they were doing and where they were taking the ir part of the firm.  He had pr e ceded me and immediately felt his own inadequacy as a presenter, seeing me work the room.  His preferred option...

I gave a speech recently to a room full of managers, some foreigners and some Japanese.  It was an internal talk and the purpose was to get the leaders motivated and get their mojo going, after having been hammered by three years of Covid.  They recently passed across the feedback and it was quite confusing.  Some said, "love the passion, dynamism" etc., and some said, "too loud, too strong", etc....

TikTok, Reels and all of the other super short form visual media are creating a nightmare for presenters.  Twitter started things off with the very limited number of words allowed per tweet, forcing people into tiny corners of the mind.  The trend toward short form rather than long form has meant that audiences are getting trained to absorb information in tiny little blocks.    What happens though...

The vast majority of the time in our company we are teaching presentation training to groups of fourteen.  We have two instructors and we video everything.  We provide an enormous amount of one-on-one coaching during the training and the results are spectacular.  All good.  From time to time, we provide one-on-one coaching to company Presidents.  Usually, they have a special talk coming up and the...

Most foreigner delivered presentations in Japan will be delivered in English and have a mixed audience of both Japanese and non-Japanese.  There is the tendency to imagine, because it is in English, that any necessary Japanese cultural components can be over-looked. The presumption is the presentation can be delivered, just as it would be, for a foreigner only audience.  Why would we imagine that?...

There were three experts on the panel for this luncheon event.  One man and two women.  They were using microphones but that didn't help in one case.  A very well presented, professional woman was adding her insights and point of view on the topic, but I couldn't catch what she was saying.  My table was situated right in front of her but to no avail.  The man had a strong voice, as did the other w...

When I exchange business cards in Japan, I select from the one designed for a Western audience and another for a Japanese audience.  Often, I will hand one over to a foreigner and then a different one to the Japanese person accompanying them.  This will draw a remark, "Oh, the back of the cards are quite different".  I like to ask the Japanese person what do they think is the difference when they...

I was reading a post on LinkedIn by an American lady, who spilt coffee over her blouse, just moments before she was due to give a key presentation to a group of executives.  That got me thinking about how to handle these types of disasters which arise when we are presenting.  Most of them are tech related – nothing works, it partially works or it suddenly stops working.  Some disasters are down to...

Presenting online is difficult.  Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter.  We teach presentation skills and one of the big breakthroughs for our class participants is the ability to get engagement with their audience.  In the online world of presenting this is almost impossible.  You become this t...

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success.  Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan's population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049.  At the same time Japanese companies are looking outs...

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job.  Suddenly we are left with nothing.  If it is an internal transfer, we may find t...

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck.  The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message.  If you ever doubt this, take a look at most Japanese business presentations.  The slide will usually be amazingly overcrowded and dense to a degree you cannot comprehend in a traditional culture, which has embraced zen simp...

  The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections.  We don't need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be a presenter, but we do need to borrow from their catalogue and start building up stories.  I was listening to an interview with a rakugo professional. They make their living telling stories.  They do...

Don't Forget To Pause When Presenting   Nervousness drives speed when we are speaking.  Without even realising it, the adrenaline pumping through our veins is speeding everything up.  Once we get on a roll, it is hard to get off that speeding, runaway train.  The speed may not always be driven by nerves though.  Sometimes expertise can be our downfall. I was listening to a speaker being interviewe...

"Man, it feels hot in here.  My throat is parched.  My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach".  These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hundreds of sceptical, beady eyed people looking up and boring a hole into us as the speaker at the event.  We are concerned about whether what we are going to say is going to be well received or not.  Ou...

What do we bring to our presentations?  Usually we have two things – information and a point of view.  For a lot of presentations, the information element becomes a data dump.  This is very boring and tedious for the most part.  The issue should always be "okay, what does this information mean and what does it mean for the audience?".  We should always try and break numbers down to word pictures b...

Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long.  That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don't have enough time to include all of the cool information and stories you have at your disposal.  The absolutely wrong way to start is to harvest slides from previous presentations and then start cobbling together all of the visual pieces a...

We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation.  We make sure that we don't suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck and forget to do our rehearsal.  This run through of the talk before we give it live, is a key component of getting our timing right and our cadence flowing.  This makes us easy to follow for the listene...

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot.  We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver it as we see fit.  We control the content, the pacing, the delivery, the engagement with the audience.  Things can a sudden turn for the worse though, when we utter these fateful words, "We have 20 mi...

  ChatGPT is a marvel, there is no doubt about that.  We can programme the type of information we seek and it will scan through squillions of pieces of content and spit out an answer in seconds.   When I tried it the speech outline it came up with was quite standard and workable. We can continue and ask it to write our script for the talk and have it done instantly. Does this relieve us of having...