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343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 03/16/2025

348 Open The Kimono Leaders show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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? show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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...

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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 extra degree of difficulty.  It comes up though.  The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year.  Are you ready to meet the challenge?

There are some key components we must assemble.  There must be one clear and compelling message.  In a speech like this, we can’t rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing.  They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused.  It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose.  We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say.  Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments.  Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people’s emotions.

A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic.  We need to hit the bullseye of what grabs people’s hearts.  This is delivered through stories.  We take people on a journey of our construction.  We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think.  This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message.

Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people’s hearts and minds.  We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience.  Ideally, they can see these people in their mind’s eye.  They might be people they have actually met or have heard of.  They may be historical events, legendary figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience. 

In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event.  About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing coastal communities, of the chaos and destruction.  I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point.

We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real.  We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author’s creation, if the words create pictures.  We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place.

We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive.  We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night.  This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant.  They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story.

The delivery is where all of this comes together.  It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen.  There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect.  This is not some dubious, dodgy trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters.  No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through controlled exaggeration.  Our speaker in Phuket, toward the end of his talk, dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire  pushups on his fingertips. I don’t know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength.  It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk. 

There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity.  Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic.  The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message.  There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end.

Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference.  Make it memorable and don’t hesitate about going BIG.