342 Success As a Leader In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 03/09/2025
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....
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347 Roots of Poor Customer Service
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Poor customer service really irritates us. When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the firm. We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it. We don’t see the processes as separate. In this Age of Distraction, people’s time has become compressed. They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much permanently. We all seem to have less time than before, so we become cross if things from the internet don’t load or load too slowly. If we have to wait we don’t...
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346 Presentation Review Techniques
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team’s performance. Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter. Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points. Presenting should be no different. Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speakers were recording themselves for later analysis? I would assert that the answer would be either zero or very close to zero. Why would that be? High performance...
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345 Japan Leadership Blind Spots
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Leadership is a swamp. Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep...
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344 How Can Chinese Retail Be So Bad In Japan?
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Bad service is a brand killer. This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation. It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish. There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo. It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants...
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343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Public speaking takes no prisoners. I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that...
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342 Success As a Leader In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Being the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks...
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341 Don't Get Sabotaged By Your Colleagues When Selling in Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Sales is a nightmare. It is usually a solitary life. You head off to meet customers all day. Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can’t do on-line. Japan is a bit different. Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client. If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person. This is a country of on-the-job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations, there is more of a...
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340 How Crazy Can We Go When Presenting In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Japan doesn’t love crazy. In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go crazy, go over the top”. This is challenging in Japan. Normally, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in society. Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained. Unfortunately, this often carries over into our public presentations. Without realising it, we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, putting...
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339 Building A Team In Stages In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Team building is fraught. Actually, when do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences, aspirations and prejudices, not ours. In rare cases, we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This concept is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or...
info_outlineBeing the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired.
The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves of the stacks in the University library or other libraries in town. There was a physical card index system to help you find information, although browsing book spines was the fastest method of locating relevant tomes. Today, we have the entire holding of libraries digitized and available for discovery through advanced search tools. We have search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube and now AI platforms to help us find what we need to know.
There are powerful publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok which floodlight information to us, using crowd sourcing of knowledge. We have email connecting us globally 24/7, we have video recordings, live streaming of events, podcasts, etc., all drowning us in information. My 23 year old son’s generation have had to learn how to swim in the floodtide of data, how to analyse, synthesise, select only what is relevant, reliable and credible. Voice commands have replaced keyboards and AI is speeding up the process of access.
Even the single, most powerful savant cannot withstand this data flood, cannot keep up with the publishing platforms, cannot do it all alone. Teamwork, the distribution of labour based on finite specialties, crowd sourcing of information and ideas is now a must. Most leaders were not raised in this maelstrom of confusion and over-reaching and struggle just to keep up. We were more or less able to have a superior grasp of subjects, better information than our followers, expert authority and greater specialisation to justify us being the boss. Today, we cannot know it all or do it all by ourselves.
In any boss/follower situation, as you climb the ranks you get further and further away from the coalface and have to live the market reality absorbed by osmosis from your people. The flood of information makes that imperative even more pressing. The problem is are you and the other leaders in your organisation any good at coalescing the team’s total power? Are those at the top able to develop people further to make them highly valuable experts supporting the growth of the enterprise?
In Japan, the middle management echelon has been crushed by technology, too much data and the democratisation of data challenging their position power. Further, the speed of modern business is being propelled forward in asteroid catching slingshot mode, by instant communications and the widespread flattening of layers in organisations. In Japan, the gradual rise through the ranks, where you were coached by your bosses up the corporate rungs, until you got into a leadership position has been collapsed into only a few rungs today. Your erstwhile bosses had the time to develop their people. Today, be you expat or local, you as the boss in Japan, don’t have any time to do that.
You keep adding spinning plates to be kept in motion, as you flit from meeting to meeting, interspersed by deluge email, relentless social media and phone calls on your mobile at any hour of the day. Your “coaching time” has been compressed into barking orders and giving direction to the team. You have no time for doing much brainstorming, because you just have no time. Anyway, the brainstorming method you are using is almost 100% ineffective anyway, so it probably makes no difference. You may as well do a few more emails instead.
Actually, it does make a difference though, compared to what needs to be done. The bosses can’t do it all by themselves anymore. They don’t have all the key data and insights. They are perilously time poor, distracted, stressed and busy, busy, busy. They need to have the support of the team to get all the work done and they need the team to be engaged to care about getting it all done.
People quality is an issue and only going to get worse as Japan’s demographic decline means anyone with a pulse will be hired. People who just turn up to work in Japan, waiting for their turn to rise up through the ranks, based on when they entered the company, who are scared of their own shadow and can’t take risks are pretty much useless. These people by the way, are the majority of the workforce.
So the boss needs to be able to engage the team. This means being a great communicator, who flags the WHY all the time and makes the smallest task or simplest job seem relevant in the big scheme of things. Leaders have to be able to motivate the team through involving them in decision-making, through getting their ideas out using effective brainstorming methods, through excellent coaching of talent to help them rise.
Delegation is a powerful coaching tool hardly used for that purpose in Japan. It is corrupted by “seagull management” - the “fire orders, dump and flee” technique of the harassed boss in Japan. Because of this, it always underdelivers and underperforms. Excellent time management is a must, if bosses are to have the margin to develop their people. That activity requires good people skills and needs time. It can’t be short circuited or compressed. We have to know what is the motivator for each of our people, so we know how to align the talks and the work to be a best fit to help them advance in their careers
The days of the singular, independent, warrior hero boss are dead in Japan. The new boss is sitting atop the amalgam of the talents of the team, orchestrating the teamwork, supporting the innovations, and inspiring greatness through the actual words being spoken into the ear of each single team member. Be honest, tell me, is this what you and the other leaders are doing down at your shop? If not, then what are they doing and what should they be doing? Time to take a cold hard look at your leader cohort and if there are gaps, then get them help to fix those deficiencies.