324 The Younger Generation Are A Handful
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 10/13/2024
357 Sabotaging Your Conversations?
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you? The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted....
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356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people. There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting. It may be a pitch to secure the business, or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team. That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side. A team comprises multiple layers of...
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355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested. The snag in all of this though is employees don’t...
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354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them.
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years. What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing? Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time. The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures. Do you have a good record keeping system? When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the...
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353 Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder. Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before. Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service. Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service. We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer...
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352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline. Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat. The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible. We learn as we go along and we add experience from year to year to hopefully make life easier. So as a presenter what would be possible? There are around 4.4 million podcasts around the world. Blogs are in the...
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351 My Boss Isn't Listening
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking “this has nothing to do with my leadership”, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers...
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350 The Rule Of Three
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
350 The Rule Of Three Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year’s revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn’t. Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year? That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”. Maybe that was it, but it was hard to tell. There were three other things which were gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which...
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349 Success Speaking Formula
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students. The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment. This was pretty grand affair. The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School. Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers. It a perfect Japanese storm. Japan loves uniforms...
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348 Open The Kimono Leaders
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them....
info_outlineWe are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan. Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown and the impact this had on the job market. They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011. They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough.
In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs. The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment. This figure was only 65% in 2004. Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004.
There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again. They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns.
They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France). They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives. Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today’s figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand. The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further. They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them.
They will be the last juku or cram school generation. University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements. Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits. Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students. The Millennial’s successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics’ Generation”, will have an entirely different perspective on education. “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don’t aim for the elite universities.
Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff. What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids. That will have to disappear quite soon.
This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave. When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior. The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn’t cooperate, because others will and she will move on.
Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn. This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free. This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility.
Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers. The wooing to move will be constant. We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth. That cannot last much longer. Certainly this Olympics’ Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand.
The key word for this Olympics’ Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted. Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation. The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast.
Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders. Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare. Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training). There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership.
Is anyone in Japan thinking about this? I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”.
You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.