342 Success As a Leader In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 03/09/2025
367 How to Give Your First Major Presentation With Confidence
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
At some stage in every career, the moment arrives: you’re asked to give a presentation. Early on, it may be a straightforward project update delivered to colleagues or a report shared with your manager. But as you advance, the scope expands. Suddenly you’re addressing a whole-company kickoff, an executive offsite, or even speaking on behalf of your firm or industry at a public event. That leap — from small team updates to high-stakes presentations — is steep. And so are the nerves that come with it. Why Presentations Trigger Nerves In front of colleagues, we often feel confident. But...
info_outline
366 Win the Deal: Negotiating in Japan Without Losing the Relationship (Part Two)
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Negotiating in Japan is never just about numbers on a contract. It is about trust, credibility, and ensuring that the relationship remains intact long after the ink is dry. Unlike in Western business settings, where aggressive tactics or rapid deals are often admired, in Japan negotiations unfold slowly, with harmony and continuity as the guiding principles. The key is to combine negotiation frameworks such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) with cultural sensitivity. By doing so, foreign executives and domestic leaders alike can win deals without damaging vital...
info_outline
365 Win the Deal In Japan Without Losing the Relationship Part One
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Our image of negotiating tends to be highly influenced by the winner takes all model. This is the transactional process where one side outwits the other and receives the majority of the value. Think about your own business? How many business partners do you have where this would apply? For the vast majority of cases we are not after a single sale. We are thinking about LTV – the life time value of the customer. We are focused on the proportion of our time spent hunting for new business as opposed to farming the existing business. Where do you think...
info_outline
364 You Can’t Win A Knife Fight With A Slide Deck
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, shareholders, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation in Japan and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled unwashed and disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and...
info_outline
363 The Truth About Death by Overwork in Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to...
info_outline
362 One Pitch, No Matter How Genius, Never Works in Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Presenting to buying teams is very tricky in Japan. Because of the convoluted decision making process here, there will be many voices involved in the final decision. What makes it even harder is that some of those key influencers may not ever be present in the meeting. Those proposing the change have to go around to each one of them and get their chop on the piece of paper authorizing the buying decision. In the case of Western companies, the decision tends to be taken in the meeting after everyone has had their say. In Japan there is a lot of groundwork needed so that...
info_outline
361 Your Outfit Speaks First – Make It Say ‘Professional’
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
How should we dress when presenting and does it actually matter? Yep, it matters - particularly in Japan. Japan is a very formal country, in love with ceremony, pomp and circumstance. Always up your formality level in dress terms in Japan, compared to how formal you think will be enough. This was a big shock for this Aussie boy from Brisbane, who spent a good chunk of his life wearing shorts and T-shirts or blue jeans and T-shirts. Tokyo is not Silicon Valley, where dress down is de rigueur and where suits have gone the way of the Dodo. This is a very well...
info_outline
360 Back Your Team Or You Break Their Trust
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We don’t run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses. There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play. If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity. It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches. How do you handle cases where your people have really upset a client? The service or product was delivered, but the client’s representative is really unhappy with one of...
info_outline
359 The Sales Trap Crippling Japanese Business
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We see Japan as a modern, high tech country very advanced in so many sectors. Sales is not one of them. Consultative selling is very passé in the West, yet it has hardly swum ashore here as yet. There are some cultural traits in Japan that work against sales success, such as not initiating a conversation with strangers. This makes networking a bit tricky to say the least. We train salespeople here in Japan and the following list is made up of the most common complaints companies have about their salespeople’s failings and why they are sending them to us for...
info_outline
358 Story Magic
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Storytelling is one of those things that we all know about, but where we could do a much better job of utilising this facility in business. It allows us to engage the audience in a way that makes our message more accessible. In any presentation there may be some key information or messages we wish to relay and yet we rarely wrap this information up in a story. As an audience we are more open to stories than bold statements or dry facts. The presenter’s opinion is always going to trigger some debate or doubt in the minds of the audience. The same detail enmeshed...
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.