loader from loading.io

344 How Can Chinese Retail Be So Bad In Japan?

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

Release Date: 03/23/2025

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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
338 Sales Storytelling That Wins In Japan show art 338 Sales Storytelling That Wins In Japan

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

Salespeople often miss the point. They are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome.  Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company.  The product or service lines are expanded or updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme.  No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec.  These discussions, however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. ...

info_outline
337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan show art 337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan

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

Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control.  You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good.  However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight.  Why a street fight?  Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules.  “Oh, that’s not right” you might be thinking.  “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on...

info_outline
336 Team Glue Insights In Japan show art 336 Team Glue Insights In Japan

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

Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the...

info_outline
 
More Episodes

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 here can be so oblivious to Japanese standards of omotenashi.  Omotenashi is that sublime combination of anticipating and exceeding client’s expectations, that has made Japanese service so famous.  I love Chinese cuisine and I enjoy the high quality standard of Chinese food in Japan.  They have the best, most expensive quality, very safe ingredients and really great Chinese chefs here. When I go to places in Tokyo like Akasaka Shisen Hanten in Hirakawacho the service is very, very good.  My observation is that is probably the case because the serving staff are Japanese or Chinese who have grown up here. 

Whenever I go to some “all Chinese” affairs, with only Chinese staff, I find the service is disappointing.  I had this experience again recently in the Azabu Juban.  It was a first and last time to go to this particular restaurant. The food taste wasn’t the issue, in fact some dishes were delicious.  It was the total disinterest on the part of the serving staff and their manager.  You don’t feel any particular need to go back there, when there are a hundred other restaurants within a two-minute walk. 

This makes no sense to me, because when I am Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan, the restaurant service is usually very good.  Obviously, the more expensive the restaurant, the better the service of course. So, there is nothing inherently missing in the service mentality and capability, that couldn’t be applied in Japan.  Why then is it so lacking in omotenashi?

I remember reading a purported Chinese saying that, “A man who cannot smile, should not open a shop”.  Obviously, some of the Chinese staff working in these establishments I am complaining about, have never heard of that piece of ancient Chinese wisdom.  Smiling, making you feel welcome, treating you well are a big fat zero in my experience.  The way of serving is very perfunctory, even rough, in some cases. Japanese style restaurant table service is generally very much more refined.  What is driving this difference and what does it mean for the rest of us in the service business?

Perhaps some of the Chinese staff we are seeing serving in Japan are students. According to the media reports, many are actually working almost full time.  They are not professionally trained service staff, in the sense that this is their career.  Coming from certain parts of China and from different socio-economic backgrounds, they may have had no exposure to what good levels of service looks like. 

I went to China for the first time in January 1976 and have been back a number of times over the years.  I studied Chinese language, history and politics at Griffith University’s Modern Asian studies faculty. I like many aspects of Chinese culture and studied Tai Qi Quan for about ten years with my excellent teacher, Cordia Chu in Brisbane, before I moved back to Japan.  I haven’t been back to China for a while, but I don’t recall the service being particularly bad when I was there last.  Perhaps some of these local serving staff living here in Japan only ever eat Chinese food, so they are never exposed to how Japanese restaurants serve their clients. I find that hard to believe though.

The thing that puzzles me most is that despite the fact these Chinese staff are working in Japan and are floating in a deep ocean of omotenashi, some don’t seem to picking up any ideas on how to treat their clients.  Why would that be?  The managers are also Chinese, so they are responsible for leading their staff in the restaurants.  Are they oblivious to the service market in Japan and how it functions?  Are they just poor managers, who cannot place their operation in a broader context of local service standards.  Are they inflexible and incapable of understanding the lifetime value of a repeater client? 

This is a very competitive restaurant scene here, has more Michelin starred restaurants than Paris, so you would expect that everyone, including some of these Chinese run establishments, would be doing everything they can to build a loyal, repeater client base.

This challenges me to consider what we are doing in our own case, with our customer facing service.  If I am going to bag some of the Chinese restaurant’s service here in Tokyo, then I had better consider our own standards at the same time.

We are a gaishikei or foreign run establishment here.  I am not Japanese, but I am the boss.  Am I operating the company service provision in terms of what I am used to in Australia, my home country?  Am I doing an Australian version of what some of these Chinese restaurants are doing here in Tokyo in their service business?  Are we in fact, providing enough omotenashi service to our own clients? Could we do better in this regard?

I find a lot of Japanese service very polite, but also rather impersonal and almost robotic sometimes.  Compared to the poorer versions of some of these Chinese restaurant service offerings however, I will take the Japanese polite, impersonal, robotic option every time. How can we see our service businesses in a different light?  How can we make sure we are not only providing omotenashi levels of service, but are going beyond that, to offer a more personalised experience? Maybe we need to audit what we are doing, to see if we are missing some vital areas for improvement.

I really like Elios Locanda Italian restaurant in Hanzomon, because I am treated like one of the family.  This is the feeling transmitted through their Japanese staff. Elio himself, is not always there, all the time, but that authentic Italian family style service is there.  He is setting the service standard and the Japanese staff are following it.  I see this example and I think to myself, “it is possible to have a more personal level of service here, transmitted through your Japanese staff”.  My family and I have been regulars at Elios since we returned to Tokyo from Osaka in 2001. Talk about the repeater, life time value of the customer.  They have seen my son grow from a baby, to a young man in that time.  We are part of the family and this is the key - we were made to feel like that from Day One.

How about your service provision standards?  Are you making your clients feel like part of the family?  What is your repeater rate?  How many people continue to buy from you, year after year? Are you tracking this?  Do you know what the average buying continuity rate is with your customers? When we see bad service, it is always a good reminder to make sure that what we are doing ourselves is at the required omotenashi level. 

If you are not sure what I am talking about with this omotenashi thing, here is my recommendation. Go to a very upscale Japanese kaiseki restaurant preferably in Kyoto or a Toraiya traditional sweets shop and remind yourself what excellent service looks like. Then reflect on what you are offering in service terms. Break down your every touch point with your customers and clients and see if there isn't a lot more omotenashi that can be introduced in each case.  We can always learn from our own mistakes and from the mistakes of others when it comes to providing better service.  The point is to observe carefully, change quickly and commit to massive improvement.