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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

Release Date: 03/23/2025

357 Sabotaging Your Conversations? show art 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 show art 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 show art 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. show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 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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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.