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

Every week The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show brings the best and most up to date information on doing business in Japan. The host of the show, Dr. Greg Story is the leading expert on business in Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Business Mastery.

Real World Business Negotiating In Japan 04/28/2024

Real World Business Negotiating In Japan We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media. It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states. Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business. A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on “tactics”. This is completely understandable for any transactional based negotiations. Those are usually one off deals, where there is no great likelihood of any on-going relationship continuing between buyer and seller. This is false flag. The aim of sales is not a sale. The aim is repeat orders. If you want to be permanently in 100% prospecting mode, then transactional selling is fine. That gets tiring and is tough, as you have to spend all of your time hunting because you can’t farm. Now there will be some cases with buyers, where that is how it rolls and there is not much you can do about it. The majority of salespeople though are trying to strike up a lifetime relationship with the buyer, so that the orders keep coming rain, hail or shine. The style of negotiations for this business play are completely different to the one-off, transactional occasion. In this world “tactics” are only partially relevant. Going one up on the buyer, getting the better of them, isn’t sustainable in a continuing relationship. They remember what you did to them and they definitely don’t like it. They either dump you completely as the supplier or they even it up down the road. They don’t forget and they don’t forgive. Technique has a role, in the sense that there are certain best practices in negotiating, which we should observe. The philosophical starting point though is key. What are we trying to do here, what is our purpose? Are we trying to build an on-going business relationship where we become the favoured supplier or are we after a one–off smash and grab deal? If you highly evaluate the lifetime value of the customer and this is your main consideration, then you will have a lot of commitment to win-win outcomes. The consideration of the communication style of the buyer is another important negotiating consideration. How we communicate with the buyer will vary, that is, if we know what we are doing. Clueless salespeople will have one default mode – the way they personally like to communicate and that is all they have in their tool box. Professionals understand that if the buyer is micro focused, we go with them on facts, detail, evidence, testimonials, proof etc. If they are the opposite, then we talk big picture and don’t get bogged down in the smaller details. We describe what future success looks like. If they are conservative, self-contained and skeptical, we drop the energy level to match theirs. We don’t force the pace, we spend time having a cup of tea to build the trust in the relationship. We mirror what they like. If the buyer is a “time is money” hard driving, take no prisoners type, then we don’t beat around the bush. We get straight down to business. In rapid fire, we lay out the three key reasons they should buy, we get their order and then get out of their office pronto. With this analysis in mind, we prepare for the negotiation by analyzing the buyer’s perspective. We use what we know about them and their situation to build up a picture of what they will need from the deal we are negotiating. We match that with what we can provide and we amplify the value we bring to the equation. We now set out our BATNA – our “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. This is our walk away position. We have analysed the potential of this client, by looking at their lifetime value as a buyer. This can have a big impact on how we see the pricing. When negotiating with a big multi-national buyer, I had to take a painful hit on my pricing. I only agreed to this though, because the volume in the first year was very substantial and the understanding was that this would be repeated annually. Now, it may not become annual, who knows, but if it does, then this is a major feast of guaranteed farming that allows a better balance to all the other hunting required. In another case, I “fired” the buyer because their pricing requirement was too low. There was no prospect of any on-going business and the volume was not attractive. When you believe you bring value, you enjoy inner confidence in your pricing. We all have our positioning in the market. If we want to maintain that, then we have to be prepared to reject low ball offers that damage our position and our brand. Hopefully you don’t have to do this too often, because you can convince other buyers to pay the full tariff. In most cases, sales negotiating requires a holistic approach, rather than a “mechanical” tactics driven approach. Decide what type of relationship you want with the buyer. If it is win-win, then we are looking at trade offs for pricing against volume and repeat business. Leave all that tricky dicky negotiating palaver to the fantasy world of Hollywood movie scripts. Let’s negotiate in the real world. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/31015378

Be Careful of Client White Noise 04/21/2024

Be Careful of Client White Noise Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets. In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client’s best interests. We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer’s needs. We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that triggers a “we hadn’t thought of that” or “we haven’t planned for that” reaction at best. At worst, at least they know whether we have a solution for them or not. Under pressure though, salespeople can temporarily become deaf toward the buyer. Even assuming they are smart enough to ask questions in the first place, they may fall over when it comes to carefully listening to the buyer’s answers. They can hear some buyer white noise in the background while they are thinking about their own interests. They are self absorbed and are not plumbing the depths of what the client is trying to achieve. In fact, they are ignoring the hints and nuances in the sales conversation. Well then, what are they doing? They are fixated on their own needs, their own target achievement, their own big bonus and their job security. The client may have outlined what they had in mind at this stage, but that won’t scratch because the salesperson needs a bigger sale to make target. They need to expand what the client wants, regardless of whether the client needs that solution or not. Upselling and cross selling are legitimate aspects of sales, but the purpose has to be very clear. It is not about making the salesperson more money. It is serving the client in a deeper way. The client may not have the full view of what is possible, because they will never know the seller’s lineup of solutions as well as the salesperson. They will also not have had deep conversations with their competitors. They won’t have been allowed behind the velvet curtain, to see what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it. They will not have had a broad exposure to what other firms and industries are doing in terms of best practice. This is the value of the salesperson, because they are constantly doing all of these things. They are like butterflies, skipping from one sweetly fragranced flower to the next. They are collectors of stories, problems, breakthroughs, successes and can connect many, many dots together. In this sense, they can see possibilities the client may not know exists or may not have thought of. This is where the cross-sell and the up-sell add value, because the salesperson can expand the client’s world and help them to become more successful. That is a long way from ramping up the number value of the sale, to make target. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30916718

Spellbinding Speech Endings 04/14/2024

Spellbinding Speech Endings It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organization, to the client or to a larger audience. The energy often quickly drops away, the voice just fades right out and there is no clear signal that this is the end. The audience is unsure whether to applaud or if there is more coming. Everyone is stuck in limbo wondering what to do next. The narrative arc seems to go missing in action at the final stage and the subsequent silence becomes strained. It sometimes reminds me of classical music performances, when I am not sure if this is the time to applaud or not. First and last impressions are critical in business and in life, so why leave these to random chance? We need to strategise how we will end, how we will ensure our key messages linger in the minds of the listeners and how we will have the audience firmly enthralled, as our permanent fan base. Endings are critical pieces of the presentation puzzle and usually that means two endings not just one. These days, it is rare that we don’t go straight into some form of Q&A session, once the main body of the talk has been completed. So we need an ending for the presentation just given and we need another ending after the Q&A. Why the second one, why not just let it end with the final question? The pro never lets that happen. Even the most knee quivering, voice choking, collar perspiration drenched, meltdown of a speaker is in 100% control while they have the floor. The audience usually let’s them speak without denunciation or persistent interruption. Life changes though once we throw the floor open to take questions. At that point speaker control is out the window and the street fight begins. Now most Japanese audiences don’t go after the speaker, they are too reserved and polite. Western audiences are less docile and big bosses ask difficult and potentially embarrassing questions. When we get to the Q&A, the members of the audience are able to ask rude, indignant questions, challenging everything you hold to be true. They can denounce you as a charlatan, scoundrel, dilettante and unabashed poseur. Sometimes, they even launch forth into their own mini-speech, usually unrelated to whatever it was you were talking about. Or they move the conversation off to a new place, which has nothing to do with your keynote content. Suddenly your message is lost. The original topic of your talk is now a distant memory. That is why the pros ensure they bring it all back together with a final close to the proceedings. Let the masses wander hither and thither with their questions, the pro never worries. After the last question is done, the last word is now with the speaker, not some provocateur who happened to turn up to the event. Surprisingly, many speakers don’t claim this right and allow the last question from the audience member to set the tone for the whole proceedings. Don’t ever let that happen. There are a number of ways of bringing the speech home. In the first close, before the Q&A, we might harken back to something we said in our opening, to neatly tie the beginning and end together. Or we might restate the key messages we wish to get across. Another alternative is a summary of the key points to refresh everyone’s recollection of what we were saying. We might end with a memorable story that will linger in the minds of the audience, that encapsulates all that we wanted to say. Storytelling is such a powerful medium for increasing the memory of what has been said, you would expect more speakers would use it. When we do this wrap-up, we should be picking out key words to emphasise, either by ramping our vocal power up or taking it down in strength to differentiate from the rest of what we are saying. Speaking with the same vocal power throughout just equates the messages together. The messaging is not clear enough and makes it hard for the audience to buy what we are selling, Bland doesn’t sell. At the end of the final sentence we need to hit the power button and finish with a rising crescendo to really put the passion behind our position. Don’t fade away. Many speakers allow their voice to become weedy and just trail off into oblivion, sounding quieter and quieter at the end. They appear exhausted and energy drained, rather than on fire with belief. Instead of fading out, we need to bring energy to our final words. We then add a small pause to let our words sink in with the audience and then smoothly move into inviting audience Q&A. We have set the markers for what we want the audience to remember and we will return to those markers as second final time. Don’t miss this key point: always specify the time available for Q&A at the very start when you call for Q&A – never, ever leave it open ended. Why not? If you are facing a rabid gathering of foes, critics and opponents and you just suddenly end proceedings, it looks cowardly and weak, as if you can’t take it when things get hot. Slinking off the stage with your tail firmly between your legs is not how you want to construct the final audience impression of you. By mentioning the amount of time available for Q&A at the first close and then referring back to it again at the end, allows you to depart with your dignity intact. You said 15 minutes and here we are, at time. No shirking going on here, just magnificent time management. Just suddenly ending, packing up and departing can make you to look like an wimp, scurrying out the door, because you can’t take it. Not a great final impression. Also, if you are trained on how to handle a hostile audience, you will sail out of there looking like an absolute legend. Few people have any clue on what to do when under pointed attack. The rest of the audience will look at you in awe and admiration, because they know if it had been them up there on the stage, they would have been mince meat. If you have been in a room and the speaker got hit with a hot missile of a question, you were probably sitting there thinking, “I am glad that is not me up there on stage”. By the way, we teach how to handle hot missile questions. If you are curious to know what to do when the gloves come off and all hell breaks loose, let us know! Now, back to our topic. The second or final close can be very similar to what we discussed earlier for the first close. Tie it all together or re-state key points or a summary. In addition, this is also the point to use a pertinent quotation or a gripping story to leave a rousing call to action in the minds of your audience. Again, the voice rises in strength at the end of the final sentence. Don’t let it fade away. Once you end, end. Don’t keep adding to it. When you get the ending right, you can then thank your audience so they are clear this is now over and you can relax and bask in their warm applause. This is a good feeling and one that every speaker can enjoy, if they know what they are doing. Action Steps 1. Carefully strategise the ending rather than leave it to random chance 2. Loop back to the beginning, hit the key message again or summarise some key points 3. Always nominate a time limit when you call for Q&A 4. Prepare two closes – one each for before and after Q&A 5. Finish strong /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30813053

Selling Into Each Region Is Different In Japan 04/07/2024

Selling Into Each Region Is Different In Japan Japan is a big small place. It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area. We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England. This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine. England has these too, but I think Japan is more pronounced in this regard. These differences pop up when you are selling here as well. The following are my experiences having sold in all of these cites and having lived in Kobe/Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo and having made sale’s calls in other provincial centers. If we go from south to north and start in Kyushu in Fukuoka, there is a local dialect and basically everyone went to school there and graduated from the local colleges and universities. Foreigners are not calling on companies all that often down there, so there is still something of a rarity factor at play here. Back in the good old days, when companies had generous entertainment budgets, the local staff were really glad to meet you. This was a grand occasion to use you as the excuse to have a big night out on the town on the firm’s dime. My ego took a bruising when I finally worked out it wasn’t the Story charm, that was generating this great enthusiasm for a night out on the town. That big spending night out culture has gone by the wayside, but the rarity interest factor is still at play. Language is an issue though, because the English speaking capability is still underdeveloped in most of Japan. The local burghers are quite cautious and conservative too. It will take a lot of patience to do business here, but it can be done. It just normally requires a lot more time than your company’s leaders or shareholders are prepared to give you. Kobe was opened as an international port on April 1st, 1868, so it is one of the most open minded towns in Japan regarding international business. They have had foreigners living in their midst for a very long time, so there is nothing special about us from a uniqueness point of view. Trade has meant dealing with the outside world and being flexible about it in the process. The denizens of Kobe often have a better level of English than other parts of Japan and they enjoy being seen as one of the most international cities in the country. I always found people there open to discussing business. Osaka is an ancient merchant town with a merchant mentality. It was the center of the great commodity markets in Japan for salt, rice and soy beans. One of the great things I like about this city is they will give you a “yes” or a “no”. Often, the reluctance to tell you “no” in Japan, leaves the whole decision piece dangling, without any clear idea of where we are going with this. Not in Osaka. If they like it, they will explore if there is a deal to be done and some money to be made. They are proud of their local dialect and this is a big divider between insiders and outsiders. As a foreigner, we are so completely outside of all consideration, that in a way, we are probably better accepted than their despised rivals from Tokyo. Kyoto I always found very closed. The aristocratic capital of Japan for centuries, it features a defined smallish city area hemmed in by mountains. The interconnectivity of the local people is pronounced. Their families have lived here for centuries, they know each other and they know who is a “blow in” and who isn’t. Even for other Japanese salespeople from out of town, Kyoto is a hard market. If you are from the outside, you are “out” for the most part. The area around Nagoya has produced the three most famous warrior leaders in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa family Shoguns, closed the country off from the rest of the world. When I say “closed”, this was upon pain of death for entry or exit. This went on for hundreds of years. In my experience, Nagoya is still relatively back there in a time warp – still closed off. I didn’t find the local mentality particularly open to foreign business and there wasn’t much English going on around there either. I said that in Osaka you get a “yes” or a “no” and that this knowing where you stood was attractive. In Nagoya, they do the same thing and the answer is usually “no". The pride of businesspeople in Nagoya is to have an exceptionally humble looking headquarters, with lousy office furniture, stained, aging carpets and everything very much down at heel, but to also have a huge pile of cash sitting in the bank. I found they were extremely tight with their money too. It is the only place I have seen, where when a new shop opens and they put those decorative flower arrangements out front on the street, that passersby will shamelessly take handfuls of the flowers away with them. They justify this on the basis that it is a waste to see them die and it is much better to have them home at their place. It is a rough and tough market. In a word to the wise, they have one little commercial idiosyncrasy that will kill you. You meet, negotiate, agree the price and sometime later the agreed goods turn up at the seaport or the airport. This is when they like to renegotiate the price with you!! “Character building” is how I would describe doing business in Nagoya. The locals are very aware of who they are and don’t open up to “foreign” Japanese from distant places like Tokyo. So, in one sense, they are very fair and they are closed minded to everyone, not just foreigners from overseas. Tokyo is a really a first class international city and so different to when I got here over forty years ago. The tallest structure here when I arrived was Tokyo Tower, which seems incredible today, when you take in the ever accumulating city skyline. English is widespread, people are sophisticated, very international and everything works well. Getting a decision though can be seriously painful. Because Tokyo is often the headquarters for companies, the scale of businesses being here is large. As a consequence, there are many, many people who have to be consulted. Getting them to agree can take an age. Sendai and Sapporo are a bit like Fukuoka to me, in the sense that they are not often visited by foreigners, seeking to do international business. The capacity to speak English is sparse and the local businesspeople are rather conservative. Sapporo at least, is an international destination during the ski season, so there are pockets of more international business there. Expect to have to keep coming back many times to build the trust. Things will move slowly and in small test increments. When I first lived here in Japan in the suburbs in Kunitachi, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I always imagined that the rest of Japan was like Tokyo. It was only when I travelled around Japan selling in the late 1980s and then later lived in Nagoya in 1992 and in Kobe in 1996, that I realised that Tokyo was not Japan. The regional differences are so important. Of course, we can do business anywhere in Japan, and ultimately I did have success in regional centers. The key success factor though is to know what is different locally and to have a defined, different strategy for each major center. Did I mention you need a lot of patience? /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30708108

How To Present As A Team When Selling 03/31/2024

How To Present As A Team When Selling In business, we are asked to present as a team. We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise. This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on. One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don’t rehearse. They just turn up and fluff it. They blow up their personal and organisational brands. When in a team environment, you absolutely cannot neglect the rehearsal component. There will be many sessions needed before you are ready to face an audience, so you have to plan for this. Do not leave this until the last moment after you have all been diligently assembling your slide decks. The batting order is important. Don’t put the brainy nerd up front. They may be the legitimate expert, but unless they are the best presenter keep them in reserve. We want the best person to lead off, because this is how we create that all important first impression. They may come back for the close out or have another equally skillful person secure the positive final impression. The technical geeky people can be safely placed in the middle of proceedings. As mentioned, don’t allow all the available team time to be sucked up by creating slides for the presentation. This is the mechanical part and we need the soft skills part to be really firing. That takes time and repetition. Set deadlines for deck completion, well in advance of the event, so that the chances to get everyone together are created. Having worked out the order, do dry runs to see how the whole things flows. Practice little things like each presenter shaking the hand of the next presenter as a type of baton pass between the team. It shows you are a tight, united unit and connects the whole enterprise together. Also, make sure each presentation can be given by everyone in the team. People get sick, planes get cancelled or delayed, all manner of circumstances can arise. At the appointed time, you are down some key members of the team. In this case the audience expects the show to go on and for you to cover the missing person’s part. This cannot be the first time this idea has occurred to you,. You need to plan for this at the very start. As you all rehearse together you hear their section over and over, so jumping in and working through their part of the deck shouldn’t be an impossibility. The questioning part might be different, but the presenting part should not create too many difficulties, if you are organised. Have a navigator for the questions determined at the start. When questions land you want that process to be handled seamlessly. I remember being on a panel for a dummy press conference, during media training. One ex-journo in the audience asked us a very curly question and being amateurs, we all just looked at each other, having no clue as to who would take that infrared missile. Our work colleagues in the audience just burst out laughing, because we looked such a shambles. Pretty embarrassing stuff, I can tell you. Anticipate what likely questions will rise, nominate who will take care of which sections and if anything indeterminate hits the team, understand that the navigator will take care of it. The navigator, will also control the questions. If it is straightforward, then after thanking the questioner, they will just say, “Suzuki san will take care of this topic” and hand it over. If it is a bit tricky, tough or complicated and is going to be hard to answer, the navigator must control things. They need to build in a bit of thinking time for the person who is going to have to take this one. They need to “cushion” the answer. By this I mean they will say something rather harmless, but which buys valuable thinking time for the person. This allows them to brace themselves for their reply. It would sound like this, “Thank you for your question. Yes, it is important that the budget allocated helps to drive the business forward. I am going to ask Tanaka san to give us some insight into how to address this budget issue - Tanaka san”. That sentence takes around 12-15 seconds to say. Tanaka san already knows she will get this one, because it is within in her designated area of expertise to answer during the pitch. The navigator provides her with some extra time to compose her strategy for her answer. Another technique, which you can only use sparingly, is to simply ask them to repeat the question. You actually got it the first time, but you may want to build in some extra thinking time to come up with the best answer. Do this too often and the games up! Teamwork requires coordination and rehearsal if you want to appear professional and well organised. When you competitors turn up like a train wreck, you will be happy you put in the work. Just make sure you don’t turn up like a train wreck and make your rivals look good. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30610168

313 Taking Questions When Presenting In Japan 03/24/2024

313 Taking Questions When Presenting In Japan The Question and Answer component of talks are a fixture that we don’t normally analyse for structure possibilities. Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. When we are planning the talk though, we may just neglect to factor this Q&A element into our planning. We may have considered what some potential questions might be, so that we are prepared for them, but maybe that is the extent of the planning. We need to go a bit broader though in our thinking about the full extent of the talk we are going to give. Should we accept questions as they arise or do we tell the audience we will take their questions at the end? What are the main considerations for each structure? Q&A in Japan can be a bit tricky though, because people are shy to ask questions. Culturally the thinking is different to the West. In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more. We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question. We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around. We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question. We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publicly announced to everyone we are an idiot. Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks. They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic. They don’t mind being moved along to an off-topic point by the questioner. The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question. They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained. There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic. This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up. They also must be good time managers and facilitators when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time. In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A. Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point. Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question. The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk. On the other hand, the advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may have done an excellent job in the preparation of your talk and have dealt with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk. The Q&A then allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order. The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides. Of course, if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk. Nevertheless, the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme. Time control becomes much easier. We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A. If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge. Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say. We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say. A public bun fight between the speaker and an audience member can be very harmful. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly, which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker. Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions well, our credibility can quickly crumble on the spot. A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look for any speaker’s personal and professional brands. So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it. For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30515053

312 Productivity Will Determine Japan's Future 03/17/2024

312 Productivity Will Determine Japan's Future During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for the first time. They often created havoc in international destinations, because they were so gauche – a bit like we have been experiencing with mass Chinese tourism. Companies bought up foreign companies and real estate at a rapid clip. French champagne and beluga caviar was being downed at an alarming pace. Finding Japanese workers became difficult, so the Japanese government turned to immigration. We had a very special immigration however. Countries with oil like Iran were allowed to send their citizens to Japan without requiring visas and suddenly we had an influx of Iranians, a bit like we have had with Nigerians. Brazilians of Japanese decent were encouraged to come and work in Japan. They rarely spoke Japanese being third and fourth generation, but they did have Japanese blood coursing through their veins. Somehow Japanese bureaucrats decided that would compensate for the fact that culturally they were 100% South Americans. With the collapse of the bubble economy many of these Brazilians went home as their jobs here in Japan dried up. We are again facing a shortage of workers in the 3K industries because of the declining population. We are scheduled to lose around 800,000 people every year. This has an impact on consumer spending because we have less people around to buy goods and services. Uncertainty over the future has played to Japanese risk aversion and native conservatism. People are not spending, preferring to leave their money in the bank at microscopic interest rates. In a deflationary economy at least you were not losing money, but that has changed now we have inflation. We are seeing Chinese and other foreigners working at convenience stores. Students can work up to 38 hours a week, which surpasses the work week in France. The Japanese government is adding immigrant workers without openly calling it immigration. Is immigration really needed when we have such low white collar productivity and low wages? Do we need to bring in mass immigration to maintain or expand the population levels? Wage growth has not occurred yet, despite companies hoarding massive cash surpluses under their corporate futons. Also, somehow the laws of supply and demand have not kicked in yet. There is a shortage of staff for child care facilities, but wages are not attractive enough to staff them. Nurses are in short demand, but salaries are not moving up much yet. Delivery workers are in short supply and there needs to be a substantial wage increase to fill the vacancies more easily. Japan is looking to robots to help cover the staff shortages. This plays to Japan’s love of robots and their technological might. What would be more impactful would be to free up the latent capacity of white collar workers. They have very low productivity because of the culture of work here. Spending long hours as a tatemae or superficial show of devotion and loyalty is not helping. The amount and quality of work being produced is more important. There is a slow rhythm of work in Japan. In the big cities like Tokyo, people are tired in the morning because of the late nights and long commutes. Working long hours is tiring and as Parkinson noted “work expands to fit the time”. Just hanging around the office to show your devotion is nice, but not all that helpful. This is the exact opposite of a productive work culture focused on outcomes. Work from home has freed up people from commute torture, but from what I can see, there doesn’t seem to be any increase in productivity as yet. Staff lifestyles are better, but company results are not being positively impacted. The other issue is very low engagement numbers. Every engagement survey seems to show Japan as the global outlier in terms of engagement. Yes there are cultural reasons around Japanese conservatism when it comes to answering these survey questions. However nobody seems to think that directionally, the low scores are wrong. Low engagement affects work pace and also creativity. Tired people are rarely innovative. Finding better ways of working has a lot of potential but it needs desire. Doing new things isn’t rewarded in Japan because in the new there is risk. Failure isn’t tolerated and there are no second careers here for failures. You have to slink off into the sunset and disappear. Middle managers are experts at not rocking the boat and they don’t see any gain from being innovative and rallying their troops around that banner. Better to get ahead by doing the same old, same old. Better leadership, delegation, time management, engagement, outcome orientation and more tolerance for failure in pursuit of innovation would go a long way to lifting Japan’s productivity. This would easily compensate for the declining supply of workers due to the demographic reality Japan is facing. Immigration is not necessary to be the first response when there is so much excess latent capacity not being maximised here. 1 /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30403633

311 Value Triumphs All In Sales In Japan 03/10/2024

311 Value Triumphs All In Sales In Japan We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc. We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer. Next, they want to negotiate the price. Do we see the connection here, between our sales approach and the result, the entire catastrophe? The reality is often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their positioning of the brand, lowering their own commission. Unfortunately, in Japan, once we have established a discounted price for the product or service, it is very difficult to move it up thereafter. What is missing? The conversation isn’t hitting the high notes on value and instead is a boring pitch based on the details of the product. Do you think you are unique in the market with this type of solution? Japan isn’t the only place where this is an issue. Despite all of the resources available to American salespeople and the long history of consultative selling there, they are failing massively as well. According to a study by Accenture, called the “Death Of the Salesman”, buyers are not seeing the value of the proposition. In 77% of cases, the buyer found no value in the offer during the sales call. In a separate study by Forrester, they found that from the buyer’s judgment, 92% of salespeople didn’t understand their business. These are pretty miserable figures, no matter which way you look at them. I haven’t seem any similar numbers for Japan, but based on my experience with salespeople here, I would guess they would only be worse. “Pitchpeople” is how we should properly term Japanese salespeople in my view. They are not asking the buyer questions and are zeroing in only on the details of the product. As the Accenture and Forrester studies show we need to know our client’s business and we need to counter price objections by showing value. Excellent advice Greg and just how do we do that you might be thinking? Knowing the client’s business these days is unbelievably more easy than in the past. AI can whip together an unbelievably fast summary of what is happening in the industry and may have details on the company you are talking too as well. Listed companies very nicely put up their annual reports on their websites. We can gain an understanding of the strategy and direction they are going and what are the major initiatives that are so attractive, we will part with our hard earned cash and buy their shares. Not that many Japanese are on LinkedIn, so this is a more difficult resource to use here, than in the West. There will be press coverage of companies, which we can search easily through Google and AI. Even if we can’t find specific information, we may have other clients in the same industry and can probably assume many of the issues will be the same. Even if we can’t get much publicly available information, we can ask the client. Now in Japan, this is thought to be verboten, so Japanese pitchpeople don’t ask any questions of the buyer. The reason is the buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD won’t answer our questions, because we are impudent minks for having the temerity to ask anything. Well it is verboten if you play by God’s rules, so that is not a wise choice. Instead, we can give our Credibility Statement and get permission that way. What is our Credibility Statement? Here is an example, if we take Dale Carnegie Tokyo, we could say “Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training company, which leads the field in soft skills training. An example of this would be XYZ company where we trained all their sales staff. They told me they got a 30% increase in sales as a result. Maybe we can do the same thing for you. In order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. Another approach might be, “Mr. Client, prior to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time researching your business, so that our talk today would be valuable and efficient. To my surprise it was very hard to find any publicly available information on your company. Before we go any further, would you mind helping me to better understand if I can actually help you or not,by asking a few questions about your business?”. Once we know what their issues are, we can make a judgment on what is the best solution for them from our lineup. We may in fact conclude that we are not a match for them. If so, we should not waste anyone’s time and we should go find someone we can help. If they are a match, then having identified the issue we explain our solution. When doing this, we need to go beyond just the product spec. We MUST explain how these facts and data transform into benefits for them. That is still not enough. A benefit applied is where they will understand the value to their business in their current circumstances. If we leave this step out, they may not be convinced we can help them. They next need proof of where we have done this for another client. Salespeople talk a lot, so clients have learnt to be sceptical of salesperson blah blah blather. After providing evidence we now ask them “how does this sound?”, to draw out any residual concerns, issues, hesitations or related questions. If we do this, we will be in the top 1% of successful salespeople in Japan without a doubt. We bring value to the client and we show we understand their business. As the surveys have shown, this is what buyers are looking for. Let’s give it to them. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30306413

310 Your Good Old Days Storytelling Is Dull In Japan 03/03/2024

310 Your Good Old Days Storytelling Is Dull In Japan Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by sharing our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing the attention of our audience. They are like greased lightening when it comes to ignoring us and escaping to the internet, so that they can go find things they feel are more relevant. We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and sceptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our track record. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they. Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his exciting adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something which happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo? It came across as self-indulgent and self-serving rather than inspiring and adding to his credibility for the market we are in today. A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the rhetorical question, they have to mentally go there themselves and think about the issue. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there against their will. Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for the audience to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are now relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it. Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts and their own track record rather than simple fluffy opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client and how I scored the big deal. Talking about ourselves is fun and personally fulfilling, but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to include our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully insert it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk and finished perfectly and comfortably on time? Case closed! In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can get ahead of the curve. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness and balance about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30205053

309 English Speaking Japanese Staff Have Disappeared 02/25/2024

309 English Speaking Japanese Staff Have Disappeared Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies. The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 Japanese students venturing off-shore. This dropped to a low of 57,500 in 2011 and since that point has climbed back above 60,000. Just to put that in context, Korea has over 117,000 students studying overseas but has half the population of Japan. Today, with many international companies looking to hire English speaking, internationalised Japanese staff, the supply situation is looking grim. Some Japanese domestic companies are becoming strong competitors because they need more international Japanese as well. These firms are branching out overseas because they fear the decline in the Japanese consumer population will stunt their future growth. Once upon a time, this meant shipping Japanese expats off overseas to be forgotten for five years, before sending the next one. The shortage of staff in Japan makes this proposition harder these days, because they are needed here as the boomer generation retires. Also with the increasing integration of overseas enterprise purchases into the Japanese mother ship, the internationalisation of the local headquarters staff is also becoming more important. So we have less Japanese youth going overseas and an increasing demand at home for those with good English and international experience. Previously the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) had been attempting to address this shortage. In 2013, the Japan Revitalization Strategy announced a government target of doubling the number of students studying abroad to 120,000 by 2020. There have been previous programmes introduced such as the “Reinventing Japan” project (2011), the “Tobitate!” (Leap for Tomorrow!) study abroad campaign (2013), and the TeamUp campaign (2015). Looking at the numbers though, none of these has had much impact to date. The current Government target of increasing the overseas Japanese student varsity population to 150,000 by 2030 sounds like an education bureaucrat’s wild fantasy, but at least there is an effort being made to address the shortage. I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation that their programmes will be producing the numbers needed in the immediate future. Why aren’t this generation heading overseas to study? A British Council study found four key reasons: 1. Don’t have the language skills 2. Too expensive, 3. Unsafe and 4. Courses abroad are too difficult. There has been a lot of discussion also about the inward looking nature of this generation. The Lehman Shock put loyal staff out on the street and shook up their kid’s assumptions about following the same lifetime employment path of their fathers and mothers. Consequently, like Millennials elsewhere, they seem very focused on themselves. They don’t have much patience for things which are mendokusai or troublesome. That particularly includes studying English and dealing with pesky foreigners. The 3/11 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor core meltdown refocused everyone on family, staying close (kizuna) and personal safety. Going overseas doesn’t really fit into that picture. Having said that though, the British Council study concluded that the interest in studying abroad is still strong. The interest may be there, but their actions are not matching the needs of business here. The risk aversion of the Japanese mentality also operates against going overseas. Their perfectionist qualities also make the mastery of English seem like the impossible dream. Getting a job when you get back is an issue because of the inflexible nature of Japanese company hiring practices. Being older than your sempai (seniors) who entered the company before you, is confusing for the company hierarchical culture. Fitting in is also harder because now because they no longer think the same as everyone else. They have dared to be different and this is not a formula for career success in Japan. Fitting in and being just like everyone else is preferred There are a couple of things we can do. Larger companies can look at providing scholarships, with golden handcuff clauses, to assist the motivated who want to study overseas, but may be financially restrained from doing so. Related to that is the issue of keeping internationalised youth in the company after hiring them. This is where company culture becomes a winner, if you are smart about it. Conditions of employ can be a lot more flexible than in competitor Japanese companies. With a declining youth population, (the number of those aged zero to thirty-four, halves over the next 40 years) employers will have to become a lot more flexible anyway, if they want to retain staff. These graduates often want to work in an international environment. However, they find themselves surrounded by local Japanese colleagues and they can’t get to use that English they worked so hard to improve. If you are running a multi-national company, why not create opportunities for them to use their English by making English the real language of the office. Monday and Wednesday can be designated Japanese day and Tuesday and Thursday English day. Friday is your free choice. Getting middle managers properly trained to lead the young is going to be a key to retention and even more so with those international youth returned from study overseas. Coaching and communication skills are going to be at a premium, because in the coming free agent world of work, the young will walk out the door to the competitor without hesitation. Recruiters will be ringing their cash registers hard as they pick up fees for luring your young away by painting a glowing picture of the greener grass at your rival’s firm. Your managers have to preclude that possibility by knowing how to provide the young a style of leadership they themselves never experienced. Tough love leading is definitely out. If your leaders pursue that route all that will be left will be tough times, as staff shortages hit companies hard. Our hiring Armageddon winter has well and truly arrived and hungry recruiters are the White Walkers taking our young English speakers away from us. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30095203

308 Eradicate That Japan Sales Buyer "Existing Supplier" Nonsense 02/18/2024

308 Eradicate That Japan Sales Buyer "Existing Supplier" Nonsense Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard. Who is the decision-maker? Probably no single person. The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg we will never fully get to meet by the way. Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change. The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things. One is it makes for good communication internally. No one faces an unpleasant surprise. I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected. The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear. The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say. Fast action is not viewed as a plus. Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements. The ringisho piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head’s desks and each one applies their hanko or stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change. Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. Turning up as a salesperson and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order. Who wants more work? No one in Japan, that is for sure. When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier. They often have a strong CEO owner running the show – the famous One Man Shacho . They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision. You may not get to meet with the supreme dictator directly. In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business. Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days. Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, over decades, to cement the relationship. The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members. I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo. These are successful families who move in the same circles. The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations. Why would they change their trusted supplier to you, a stranger, a Johnny Come Lately? Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan. Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result. The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors. The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough. We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor. We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share. We need to point out that in a competitive industry, no one cares about the depth of the existing relationships, because they are fully focused on their survival. Rivals will make key supplier changes and these will trigger changes across the industry, as everyone else has to adjust accordingly. By getting ahead of the curve, they can win time to adjust and win market share for themselves, vis-à-vis their rivals. Price and quality differentials only become meaningful in this light in the current market. Just talking about price or quality in isolation won’t move the buyers to make any changes. Being 30% cheaper sounds good, except the dislocation required to change suppliers is counted as much more expensive than the savings to be gained. The effort to make new or change supplier arrangements needs a strong reason in Japan or else everyone just defaults to a “do nothing” stance. This requires we come armed with examples of where a change in supplier arrangements wiped certain companies out. The best option is relating changes in their industry, but even if we don’t have that, we need to show evidence of how dangerous it can be to avoid change. The drivers of change are plain to see: globalisation changing supply options, Japan’s declining population driving companies to take desperate measures to stay afloat, technical advances challenging existing business relationships, currency movements impacting pricing, etc. As an example, the DoCoMo i-Mode was a world leading phone app until Steve Jobs turned up with the iPhone and the i-Mode is no more. We say fear and greed drive behaviour. Well in Japan, the fear factor is certainly more pronounced than the greed factor, so lead with the downside of non-action rather than the upside of a new initiative. Paint a picture of how the advantages of your solution could become dangerous in the wrong hands, that is to say, their competitors. Advise them to not give an unfair advantage to their rivals by not making the change today. Express the importance of urgency, the time factor exigency to take action right now. We need to do this to drive the imperative of all those characters sitting behind the wall of the office, to get their hanko out and stamp the recommendation, showing their support for it. The people we are meeting are not the final decision-makers, so we need to arm them with the required nuclear harpoon to break through all the inertia and resistance to change, that is the hallmark of business in Japan. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/30000918

307 When Senior Executives Presentations Are Exposed In Public In Japan 02/11/2024

307 When Senior Executives Presentations Are Exposed In Public In Japan Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university. It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head-to-head in a public setting. I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit. If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced. In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up. Each person had two minutes to make their pitch. Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations. I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language. However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company. Language skill wasn’t even a factor. As you might expect, some were better presenters than others. However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding. They knew for many weeks that this day would arrive, that they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes. They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say. This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers suddenly thrust upon a bunch of innocents. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine, but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear. Everything was presented from their own point of view. A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have identified which hot buttons they needed to push. This is not hard stuff folks. They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be? Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present about how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members. We only have two minutes, so that means we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points which will resonate with the audience. We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit. We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we rush it, they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about. Now when we deliver our talk, we have to engage with our audience. We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that our successor speaker cannot root it out. Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all. What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop! The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people. Using six seconds of one-on-one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience. Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially. Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect. Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery. Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying. It creates energy and that is what we want to transmit to the audience – we are a person of energy who can get things done for the members. Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don’t show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see. It was all pretty bad actually. Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations to external groups. This is not something we are born with. We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers. There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats. When it is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water. Prepare properly, rehearse thoroughly, work on the mechanics of audience engagement through your eye contact, gestures and highlighting key words. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29891093

306 The Leader Must Resolve Internal Conflicts In The Team 02/04/2024

306 The Leader Must Resolve Internal Conflicts In The Team Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often at home on our own a few days a week or in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained and difficult. Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of irritation and impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely annoyed. Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations! Imagine our forebears who when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super snail mail ping pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it and we want it now and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace. Technology speeds everything up and internal expectations also keep rising. Time is in permanent short supply and the stresses and strains of modern business are inescapable. Not everyone is keeping up and criticism is swift to follow. The pressure is on and that means that civil discourse can be truncated and communication becomes more direct. All of this can increase the frequency of conflict in the workplace. What can the leader do to deal with this upsurge in people problems between staff? Let’s analyse the issue in more depth. We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. Process Conflict – is this what we are dealing with? How much control do we have in this particular issue we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware that their process driven actions are causing problems for others. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and come up with a joint action plan to fix it. Role Conflicts easily arise in flat organisations. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead to do so. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. This may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!). Interpersonal Conflicts are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actions, behaviors and word exchanges which have taken place and the reported versions from others around us. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Are people telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason? There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself. This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have that one-on-one conversation. Direction Conflicts arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone of what needs to happen or at the same time. Check that you are in fact clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together. External Conflicts are tough because by definition, you lack power or control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control stop and re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the hardest working man in show business Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”! Leaders have responsibility for dealing with staff conflicts and there is no sweeping these under the carpet or ignoring them. We have to take accountability to fix the issue and get everyone pulling in the same direction with the same levels of commitment. Energy spent fighting each other internally means that energy isn’t being directed toward defeating the opposition. That is a total misalignment of outputs and we need to fix that problem and fix it immediately. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29787878

305 Have You Upped Your Sales Game With 5G Speed? 01/28/2024

305 Have You Upped Your Sales Game With 5G Speed? The release of 5G or fifth generation mobile networks was launched in Japan in March 2020. Our old phones ran on a 4G standard and 5G faster is significantly faster than 4G. So what does that mean for salespeople across all industries? The capacity to upload heavier files, to be sent at lightening speed, grabs your attention. What are some of the heaviest files at the moment? Video! YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google. It is true too. I have noticed myself that I prefer going straight to YouTube to find out how to do something, rather than wading through all the links and ads on Google. The union of content marketing with blinding connection speeds, means the search function for YouTube will overtake Google in the next few years. AI will probably overtake everything for search in the future. Nevertheless, are you prepared to be found by buyers as the star of your own video? Now this is not to say that the importance of audio is going away. Podcasts are also a key way of getting value by turning up in front of buyers. That is why I am releasing six ever week. People are multitasking these days like they have been possessed by demons. They want to listen to audio, while they are at the gym or walking the dog. Don’t miss the implications of audio access to our information from all of these devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home, etc. We will be tapping into information through audio, to a greater extent than now, but today I want to feature more on video and 5G and what it means for us in sales. Producing video content and uploading that to YouTube will become a more important aspect of “know, like and trust”. Video gives a very strong impression about us. How we look? How we sound? Are we trustworthy? How we relate to the audience? Are we authentic? As some of my friends have unkindly remarked, “Greg, you have a good head for radio”, meaning I am not very photogenic. True. Consequently, we may be shy to video ourselves, thinking that we are not handsome or beautiful enough, or smooth enough in front of the camera, or attractive enough on tape when a microphone is involved. Forget all of that. This will be the age of discovery by buyers, before they ever meet us. This is how they will be searching for experts to bring solutions for the problems they face. They will be able to “try us before they buy us” by watching our video, to see if we have the goods or not. What if we are not attractive enough for video, won’t that work against us? Well, I wish I was more handsome, but there is not much I can do about that. My parent’s DNA contribution has spoken. I have to go with what I have got and so do you. I am releasing three video shows every week. I don’t have a great sounding voice either, because it sounds husky, from all that shouting or kiai I did, in my 53 years of karate training. Can’t do too much about that either. One of our Dale Carnegie trainers in America is DJ Thatcher, who has a voice you would die for. Very deep and melodic. I can’t become DJ Thatcher, but I can control what comes out of my own mouth. So despite how we look and how we sound, are we providing actual value? Our videos have to show we know something special about our subject and that we can be useful to the buyer. Don’t think you have to hold the “best bits” back either and keep them secret. You have to go the other way and provide strong expert authority in this environment and do it for free. Put your best stuff out there. You might sorry, “won’t my buyers become sated on my free video offerings and not need more from me?”. I don’t think this is a concern. When they need more than what they can get from a video, you are the one they will select over everyone else you are competing with. By the way, if a video can fix their issue that simply, then there probably wasn’t a substantial engagement involved anyway. Won’t my competitors steal all my best ideas? The old style control function of buyers by suppliers, through exclusive, high value, proprietary knowledge, still exists, but only just these days. Almost everything is out there today. I remember in karate training, that the Sensei had the secret knowledge of the kata and we could only learn it from him. It was a control mechanism to keep us in line. Today, you can learn the most amazing kata via YouTube. That secrets era has passed and there are not many secrets left anymore. You have to jump in because everyone else is. There is a safety factor though. They can copy you, but they can’t be you. I could order a big truck right now and send all of our training manuals to my competitors, but it wouldn’t help them. They don’t know how to deliver it the way we do, so all they get is an empty shell. This is the same with your competitors. They can’t replicate who you are, your company culture, your approach to clients, quality, reliability, plus all the human interaction pieces which are the sum of all that you are, down at your firm. As an example, I recently did the recordings for the audio version of my book Japan Sales Mastery. Anyone could have read the text, but no one would emphasised key words the way I did. This is because I wrote it, I know what I want to say and how I want to say it. We cannot be copied. Get busy and get your stuff out there in the public domain. So let’s start working on video of you for your newsletters, video email messages, website, YouTube channel and then push it out through social media so that it can be easily found. These days you have so many choices. You can do it through various live broadcast functions as well. You just pick up your phone and away you go. Although, as I found live broadcasting is like walking on the high wire between two skyscrapers, with a strong wind blowing and no safety net for beginners. If you screw it up in the first forays, like I did (!), you are very visible to lots and lots of folks. Oops. I am your typical male who never reads the manual. I found out later there is a function you can select where only you can see the video, which is probably a good precaution when you are starting. Hey, I should have done that! You can go for weekly YouTube TV shows like I have, with The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show or The Japan Business Mastery Show. High quality camera, lighting soft boxes, serious audio recording technology, a set, editing suite, green screen, etc. Or you can shoot something on the move with a mobile phone, or a tablet, as the camera quality is so good today. Just add an external microphone, stand close to the camera and away you go. It can be edited later, so you can correct any problems. I have a number of videos on our Japan Dale Carnegie TV channel on YouTube which were shot on my iPad with an external mic. Very low cost and time effective for the quality. The audio is key though, so I suggest you make an effort to get that to be the best you can arrange. What about appearing in front of the camera? My recommendation is to do our High Impact Presentations Training course. I don’t say this because it is Dale Carnegie, I say it because it is such an awesome course. This will give you the supreme confidence and skills to master the lens. That is what I did and you can check out the results in my videos! I reckon if I can do it with how I look and how I sound, you can do it and probably do it much better. You will now see AI technology rolling over the top of you or you can start surfing down the face of the wave. The technology is here now and time waits for no salesperson. Action Steps 1. Read up on the technical innovations underway and what it will mean for you 2. Understand the power of the YouTube search function with buyers 3. Get over your inhibitions about being video and voice recorded, no one cares, as long as you are bringing value 4. Be prepared to share your best stuff for free, because your competition will be doing that 5. Start, review, improve, continue, master /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29678053

304 Never Fear The Q&A When Presenting In Japan 01/21/2024

304 Never Fear The Q&A When Presenting In Japan Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. Let me put it on the table. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound. People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks. This is their excuse for not being at the global standard for communication skills and it allow them to get away with amateur hour presentations. What they actually mean by “Japanese style” is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon, engage no one in the audience and are supremely boring. They kill everyone in the audience with their unprofessional slides - 8 point sized font, four different font types, five garish colours. They turn their slides into a psychological weapon of warfare which decimates their audience. Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations. It isn’t a style. It is just plain bad. Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory. For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the well-known American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences. The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff. So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case. Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting. 1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous The reality here is that strangers are confronting for Japanese. The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say. The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk. Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. I have delivered over 550 speeches so far and I cannot recall every giving a talk to the same audience twice. The way to deal with this “unfamiliarity” is to be well prepared and to have thoroughly rehearsed beforehand. This is a tell. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have ever rehearsed their talk. 2. I am not sure if I can understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all. The thinking has been that it is impolite. The nuance is that by asking a question, you are implying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration. Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question. In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough the first time and so is a veiled criticism. Because the request for the repeat of the question is made in public, there is the possibility that the questioner will lose face and we can’t have that. My advice - politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question. Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, “Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”. 3. Not clear on how to answer the question This will happen to all of us. In my case, I do a lot of public speaking here in the Japanese language and I always find the Q&A the most difficult. This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language. Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement. Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me. If we can’t answer the question, then we are human. We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question. We should apologise and fess up straight away. “Thank you for your question. I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point. After the talk, let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”. No one will complain about handling it in this way. 4. No questions emerge because the audience weren’t paying any attention to the speaker Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about. The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone. The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest. It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs. If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”. This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question. I am always amazed at well his works in Japan. No one wants to go first. But interestingly they are happy to go second after you started with your own question to yourself. After doing this, If nothing is still forthcoming, then do a final call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings. Here are two basic rules for answering any question. Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it. If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral. For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”. “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it. We call this taisabaki in karate – you slip off to the side, away from confronting the full force of your opponent’s attack. We will face Q&A when giving our talks. Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start. We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme we raised. We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience. When we shoot down a nasty, vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious luster to our personal brand. Bring on the questions! /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29579028

303 Leaders Need To Recognise Their People's Work In Japan 01/14/2024

303 Leaders Need To Recognise Their People's Work In Japan The Spa magazine in Japan previously released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. Salaries are a function of deflation and commercial success, as well as the tightness of the labour market. Feeling unappreciated and underevaluated though are both boss failings unrelated to the economy and cannot be esily dismissed. This outcome is the direct result of decades of neglect of the soft skills of leadership. How do we improve on this situation? We need better leader eduation. The feeling of being valued by the boss and the organisation is the trigger to producing high levels of engagement for your work. Japan is renown for always scoring poorly on international comparative engagement surveys. APAC as a region usually trails last across the world and Japan is usually situated at the very bottom for engagement scores in APAC. The global study on engagement by Dale Carnegie showed that feeling valued was the key factor. The results for Japan were the same. Good to know that we have the answer at hand to improve levels of engagement. By the way, disengaged or hardly engaged staff are not going to add any additional extras to their work or be motivated to come up with a better way of doing things. Innovation requires some sense of caring about the organization. So work productivity and innovation both need higher levels of engagement to help us get anywhere. In any competitive business environment, the abilty to out innovate your rivals has to be a very high value to the firm. Fine, but so what? How do we get leaders who were raised in a different world of work – the bishibishi(relentlessly super strict) school of leading to now switch to becoming more warm and fuzzy? Telling them to do so is an interesting intervention by senior management that will go precisely nowhere. This requires re-education on what we need from our leaders. The most widespread system of education in corporate Japan is OJT (On The Job Training). How does your bishibishi boss change mindset alone? They can’t. That is why training is required to better inform bosses about how to gain willing cooperation from subordinates, instead of just pulling rank on them to drive their obedience. In the modern era, young people have all become free-agents, like the baseball stars. In their parent’s time, staff were fearful of being able to get another job, if they strayed from the beaten path and quit where they worked. Not today. There is an army of hungry recruiters scouring firms to lift people out and place them in another company. They can click the ticket for 40% of the first year salary on the way through this change of employ. By the way, the individual recruiter gets 50% of the fee. It is a highly lucrative profession and relatively young, unremarkable people make a lot of money so the incentives to take your people and place them somewhere else is super high. In this circumstance, there is no need to make it any easier for the recruiters by treating your staff badly. How to deal with mistakes is a key to the future in a society that hasn’t worked out that mistakes are the glide path to learning. Japan is a mistake free zone and this is a big disincentive to experiment, to try the new. Locating oneself in the middle of your comfort zone makes the best sense, so you want to avoid all change efforts. Here is the contradiction. If you want innovation, progress, creativity, then change must be embraced. That also means embracing risk - the risk of error. If the internal evaluation process for promotion is used to focus all the failings and insufficiencies of the staff - the dreaded HR little black book of staff mistakes - then don’t expect your shop to become a hotbed of innovation anytime soon. What should we be doing? Leaders need to be helping staff lead intentional lives. Goals, strategies to achieve the goals, milestones, targets all come as part of the package. This is different from being Mr. or Ms. Perfect and holding the team to standards you yourself can never possibly achieve. Encouraging people to come out of their comfort zones, take some risks and try new things requires a lot of communication skills. It requires feedback, but not critique. Telling people they are wrong, may make the boss feel superior and good, but it kills staff motivation and interest in doing things any differently. Good/better feedback is a better strategy. Tell them what they are doing that is going well and praise them for that. Tell them what they could do to make things go even better. The point is still communicated, but in a much better way and will be received in a more positive frame. Because of the old fashioned style of management in vogue here, Japanese bosses are actually untrained in how to give praise. Telling staff “Good Job” is not praise by the way. That comment is a very vague reflection on a piece of work. Tasks have many facets, the staff know that and so which part of that project did they do well? We need bosses to be very specific about which bit was done well and how it was done well. Leader then need to explain how that task fits into the big picture of the organization and encourage the staff member to keep doing that. Clearly, the leader in Japan has to do better. The soft skills area is where the greatest productivity gains will come from, because hard skills education in Japan is already maximised. This is the next frontier of leadership. If Japan can unlock the full potential of the working population, we are in for an exciting future. If it can’t, then things look bleak. What is happening in your organisation at the moment? What are your leaders focused on? What is current your staff attrition rate? How long does it take to hire in new people and what is ther quality like? How expensive is it to replace people? Do you have strategy for all of this? The best time to start was yesterday. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29476178

302 Starting Your Sales Presentation With A Lie Is Idiocy In Japan 01/07/2024

302 Starting Your Sales Presentation With A Lie Is Idiocy In Japan Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople. We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you. “I am not like that” you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold someone called me up with a lie. A lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering? Well, have you heard this one before, “Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?”. This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can’t hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one or not, for many months and in some cases, many years. So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script like this one, totally built on a lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won’t be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. I don’t put up with is unprofessionalism and I go after them. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out “Akasaka”. So, because I am unrelenting with such idiots, I ask, “Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?”. More blustering and panic, because now we have gone completely off piste. Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture inside the sales profession. Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never readily admit to it. They never want to take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying. This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can’t just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won’t lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous. The back office delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time and prefer to sow chaos internally. It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don’t lie to buyers. We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying. This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale. Also, a hard-nosed sales culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm’s integrity to do the deal. Suruga Bank had been a very aggressive lender in the market. They reaped the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by their bank staff to get loans written. Wells Fargo had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas. The real cost of those lies play out over many years. We may have our own aggressive targets too, but we also have to ensure that we are guiding people along the correct path of how to make those targets. If we all agree that trust of the buyer is key, then we can start to build that trust by ensuring that our salespeople are never lying to the buyers, in order to make a sale. We have to remind salespeople of one very important thing. We are not after a sale. This is important so let me repeat this point - we are not after a sale. We are after repeat orders and these only come when there is a track record of trust. We are currently negotiating with one of the biggest companies in the world. We won’t continue with them, because they are after a single low value transaction rather than an ongoing relationship. We are not after a single sale. We would rather put our energy into finding a buyer we can work with forever, than get bogged down in a small transactional piece of business. Let’s wrap this discussion up. The solution to this lying salesperson problem doesn’t arrive from outside. John Wayne is not going to come charging over the sand hill, heralded by a bugle call, to our rescue. This is an inside out process. We have to start with our own sales operations and clean that up. If we do this consistently over time, we can isolate out the baddies, the dodgy types, the liars and contain the harm they do to us. None of us want to work in a profession that stinks. Our job is to develop good people in sales, rather than good salespeople. Is this what you are doing at the moment /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29301353

Salespeople Don’t Care 12/25/2023

Salespeople Don’t Care Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc. The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”. Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales. Don’t miss it - selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about? Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy Siberian mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”. I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought the 3 series Beemer before the ink is dry? The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え). It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”. Sounds a bit woo, woo doesn’t it. Well it is sound business sense. This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what you want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? There I go again. Does this sound a bit too “let’s all hold hands around the a tree” California emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you. Even if somehow you do manage one sale, you will miss the key objective – the buyer’s re-order Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand. Wolf of Wall Street ring a bell here. That dude went to jail, which is where he deserved to go, for ripping all of those punters off and stealing their savings. He is out of jail now and is a sales trainer – the mind boggles at the thought. This is why people don’t trust salespeople. We have to prove we are different because we are judges guilty from the outset. The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was also a criminal. A criminal? Well, the criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks. Let me make a note to Sales Managers – do background checks!. He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a closer! I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson. Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie. He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong. What a wake up and smell the coffee moment for me. I realised how naïve and trusting I was. So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept. Change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own. If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a power personal brand. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29221748

How To Disagree Agreeably 12/17/2023

How To Disagree Agreeably It's inevitable - at some point disagreements are going to come up in the workplace. Power struggles, political plays, sectionalism, siloism – the list goes on regarding sources of organizational conflict. As we all know, disagreements can get heated quickly and it can be difficult to put aside our opinions and biases in order to handle the situation diplomatically. We can get locked into positions and we regret what we said later. Powerfully motivated people often have powerful egos and when conflicts arise, teamwork can be compromised. It can become our team against their team, except we are all working for the same organization! We have conveniently forgotten all about our competitors in the market, as we turn on each other. This is not a winning formula. Positive internal collaboration is a product of the culture created in the organization and needs to be built and rebuilt all the time. It doesn’t have to be a “winner takes all” and the losers are vanquished in a battle of wills and egos. There are several tried and true methods to "disagree agreeably” with colleagues and get the issues out on the table, but still preserve the teamwork. Would that be something that would be worthwhile pursuing? The opportunity cost of wasting energy fighting each other and not winning in the market is huge. We should stop shooting ourselves in the foot. Let’s become a united team that allows many viewpoints and alternate ideas. Sounds good except most organisations have no idea how to do that. Here are some ideas on how to navigate a disagreement in an empathetic manner, while presenting your point of view. Give the benefit of the doubt. Don't immediately jump to conclusions even if you disagree with someone. Be generous with others.Hear them out, you may have more in common than you initially thought. We are not perfect, we don’t have all of the possible information or all of the possible angles to view an issue. Instead of concentrating on defending what we think, we should start with an open mind that there are many paths to the mountain top. We may be wrong and wouldn’t we want to have the latest and best information available, as we duke it out in the marketplace with our competitors? Listen to learn and understand. Be an engaged listener, make sure you are listening on an empathetic level instead of just pretending to listen. We do this don’t we.By gathering all the facts about the other person's point of view, you will be able to deliver your counterpoint in a diplomatic manner. We need to switch gears from what we usually do. We are often notorious interrupters, jumping in finishing off other’s sentences before they do, or just talking over the top of them to thrust our opinion forward. We have trouble maintaining our listening capability when our brain is awash with what we want to say. Our own internal conversation is all encompassing, roaring and it is effectively drowning out the points being made by the other person. We need to be better at listening to others before we shoot our mouths off. It should be done in this order – ear, brain, mouth - not ear, mouth, brain. Use a cushion. This is inserting a little break in the proceedings, so we can think before we speak.Acknowledge the other person's point of view and relate to their emotions through empathetic listening. How do we do that? We can use cushion statements such as "I hear what you're saying and what you're saying is important" or "I understand your point of view" to demonstrate that you understand and care about their feelings. As I said, it is important to wait until they have finished speaking before we respond. I know, I know, this might feel absolutely painful and excruciating but do it! Having exercised some patience to hear them out, now we bring in the cushion. This is a great little interregnum to allow us some thinking time before we go into our response. Our immediate first response is usually not our most considered or best response. It can often be an emotional response as well. Cushion, then respond – the results are enormously different. It takes practice and won’t come naturally but the rewards are vast. Number 4 is never use "but" or "however." No matter how much you empathize with someone, if you follow up your cushion statement with words like "but" or "however," it will negate everything prior. You lose credibility and the person you're disagreeing with is unlikely to take your thoughts seriously from this point on. We are all trained like hawks to watch for body language guiding us as to whether they agree with what we are saying or not. So we have to make sure we are not giving off a negative vibe without even being aware of it. We are also trained to listen for key words that tell us whether we have an argument on our hands or not. Words like “but”, “however”, “in reality” etc, set off alarms in our heads. We immediately arm ourselves for counterattack when we hear those words. Sun Zu’s advice in The Art of War, was to win without fighting, so let’s do that. Instead of words that contradict the other person’s original statement, use words like "and" or insert a pause instead. Here is an example. “That is a good idea but we have to look at the budget ramifications”. This sounds negative and unhelpful. Try this instead, “That is a good idea and we will need to look at the budget ramifications”. The impression we get from the second version is more positive and hopeful. Just change one word and the inference is vastly different. Number 5 is State your opinion with evidence. Opinions are easy to refute, but facts are difficult to argue with. By backing up your point of view with evidence, you come across as more credible and can gain valuable leverage in a disagreement. By utilizing evidence, you may even be able to bring someone over to your line of thinking. It is also a smart move to bring in the facts in a subtle way. Rather than using facts as a mallet to belt them with, offer some consideration such as “I may not have all the facts but I was aware that this was the case, how does that correspond with your experience?” Always be aware that people don’t like to lose face, be embarrassed, be humiliated or to feel slighted. We know this but in the heat of the moment we may go too far. Ramming facts down their throat may mean you are correct. This may make you feel good, but you potentially create an enemy for life nevertheless. We get into trouble when the message is delivered in the wrong way. So try these ideas and become much better with holding your position, being heard and retaining the relationship with people who disagree with you. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29113133

Presentation Effectiveness 12/10/2023

Presentation Effectiveness We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we! We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak. We judge their dress, their body language, their style, without knowing anything about them as a person. We are slow to unwind our first impression as well, so those first seconds of any interaction are vital. How is that going for you? We are all critics too, when it comes to presentations. We want the best, we want to be educated, entertained, wowed in our seats and we are usually disappointed. We carry that history of disappointment around with us like heavy baggage, to the next presentation and the next and the next. We shamelessly hold others to a level of accountability, we never wish to have imposed upon us! The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. It doesn't have to be a formal occasion. It might just mean answering a question or being invited to express a view or opinion. It is your job to ensure that you are ready to step up to the call. An individual who can present confidently and effectively immediately differentiates themselves from the rest of the group. This is how to stand out in a positive way, a way that gets noticed when bosses are looking around for high potentials and they are always looking round for high potentials. Whether you are a pro or a beginner with presenting or public speaking, here are some considerations for improving your presentation and communications skills. Fear Many people are terrified of speaking in front of a group. Everyone is staring at you, your palms are sweating, your pulse is racing, strangely your throat feels suddenly dry and parched, your energy levels have mysteriously dropped to precipitously low level. Your knees might even be knocking as the fight or flight adrenalin chemical kicks in when leased by your brain. Many of us can accomplish pulling off a presentation, but feel a certain amount of fear and stress. Speaking in front of groups does not have to be stressful or nerve racking; instead, make the experience positive so that it can help you stand out and get noticed. Here are some tips that will help you fight through your anxiety and deliver an effective presentation: Prepare, Prepare, Prepare If you have a complete understanding of your material, it will definitely give you an advantage during your presentation. It will help to reduce the fear element because you will be in control. However, do not feel you have to memorize your material; you just need to be familiar with it. You can read key points as mental prompts to help you keep the flow going in the best order, but don’t read it in detail, if you can avoid it. Many people are wedded to their text. They spend the entire time making eye contact with their own words on the page in front of them, rather than looking at their audience. They then wonder why nobody was impressed with their presentation. Look at your audience – talk to them as if it was fireside chat, be relaxed and engage with everyone. I attended the Harvard Business School, as part of an Executive Education Programme. I found this technique fascinating in its simplicity. One of the Professors had written down a list of 10 words on the back wall behind the audience. This was his 3 hour lecture presented entirely without any visible notes. This list was his navigation for the talk. We can do the same. A list of key words you talk to can be your presentation or you might use the slide deck as the navigation tool to move your talk along. Open with Confidence. Here is a big secret - only you know you are terrified. Unless you tell us, we will imagine you are competent, after all that is what we are expecting. I saw a disaster unfold when the speaker told us she was nervous. She had an impressive resume, was tall, well groomed, a confident looking business professional. Or so we thought. A few minutes into the presentation she suddenly stopped, told us she was nervous and that she had to take a deep breath. And she repeated this sequence two more times. Her credibility just rocketed out right the window at that point and nobody took anything she had to say with any credence. She destroyed her message, her reputation and her personal brand in the space of 30 seconds. She could have paused, taken a breath, regrouped and carried on. We would have thought it was a natural break in her flow and thought nothing about it. She chose to tell us publically – big error right there. Keep it to yourself no matter how badly you feel inside. We don’t need to know and we don’t want to know. Japan of course, being a very humble society, loves to start a presentation with an apology, often mentioning what a hopeless speaker the individual is. The President of a huge retail corporation here in Japan recently began his talk with an explanation that his English wasn’t any good and that he had never given a talk like this in English before. He was piling on the excuses. He then delivered a sparkling talk in near perfect English! Did the excuses add any value to his presentation? Of course not. No excuses. No, no, no! This is a presentation – it is not chit chat with your friends. This is your personal brand we are talking about here. If you are sick don’t tell us. If you are nervous don’t tell us. If you are sad because your cat died, don’t tell us. Don’t say anything about how you feel, because then the focus is on you and not where it should be - on your audience. Work the room instead – focus outward not inward. Look at the audience the entire time you are speaking – never break off eye contact. Your opening gives your audience a first impression of your presentation. Make sure not to leave anything to chance. Your opening sets the tone for your entire presentation. No ums and ahs please! If we recorded you would we hear a succession of ums ahs? Are you even aware you are doing this? Trust me it doesn’t add any value. In fact it detracts from your message, because you don’t sound convinced yourself. If you don’t seem sure of what you are saying why should I by into your message? Want to know how to completely cure yourself of ums and ahs forever when speaking?Here is how to avoid the usual speaker opening kicking off with hesitation in the form of Ums and Ahs. Select the first word of each sentence and hit it hard. Say your sentence. Now purse your lips once that sentence is completed and then hit the next sentence’s first word. Once you finish that sentence purse your lips again. Keep doing this over and over and hesitancy and timidity will disappear from your image as a speaker. Those ums and ahs will be gone. I know it works because I was a shocker too. I used this method and it cured me, so it can cure you too. Also lift your speaking volume up to about 30%-50% higher than in normal conversation. This is not a normal conversation, so it needs a different approach. Stronger volume communicates greater confidence even if you don’t have any!. You usually have microphones, so you don’t have to shout, but lift your energy. You will find that extra energy will help you relate your message more easily to the audience. We buy enthusiasm and a big part of enthusiasm is energy transfer from the speaker to the audience. You will notice that speaker with a little mousy voice gets switched off pretty quickly by the audience. You don’t have to have a DJ style bass voice. You just need to project your voice at higher levels that you are used to. If you have a reasonably strong voice and it is a small gathering, dispense with the microphone altogether, so that both your hands are free for using hand gestures. Focus on a Few Key Points. Know the major points you want to make. This will help ease your worry and increase your confidence. You should also use electronic visuals, note cards, or memory techniques to outline your key concepts. If you need some prompts then prepare them. If you are using a teleprompter make sure you can carry on without it. Why do I say that? This incident has to be one of the biggest recorded meltdowns of all time. Famous Hollywood Director Michael Bay just got started on his Samsung sponsored in Las Vegas. When the teleprompter failed, in short order so did he. You can see the disaster unfold on YouTube – it is seriously sad to watch. Remember, the slides, the flip chart, the teleprompter are all secondary to you – you are the message. Importantly, only Michael Bay and the host on stage at that time knew what he was going to say that day. He was there to support Samsung’s new curved TV screen, so everything had been scripted in advance by the marketing people. He couldn’t continue because the teleprompter had all the information he needed and he hadn’t prepared a back up plan, if the tech failed. Rather ironic for a film director who uses so much tech in his Transformer movies isn’t it. Always have a plan B is the lesson here. By abruptly walking off stage in shamed, burning silence he broadcast to the audience in the room and thanks to social media, the entire world, that he had forgotten his message, that he had 100% unceremoniously and completely failed. Now, by contrast, he could have carried on with his thoughts and we would never have known it wasn’t the intended content. Only he and the host on stage knew what was in the talk. Carry on regardless, never let us know you have forgotten what you are supposed to say – we will never know. Support Ideas with Evidence. It is always important to provide evidence to support your main points. Supporting evidence will help your audience understand your points and will give you a chance to explain your points more fully. Point-evidence; point-evidence; point-evidence is the way to go. Just because you say it doesn't mean we believe it is true. Prove it! Making claims and statement is not enough. Bring us proof, evidence, data, testimonials, corroborating expert opinion, statistics, etc. Close with a Call to Action. This will be the last impression your audience has of you and your presentation. It is important to ensure the closing reflects the purpose of the presentation. Your closing should summarize your content and give your audience a clear direction. Ask them to do something after this talk, so that you can get them personally connected with your message. Don’t forget that you must repeat your close again, after the end of Q&A. Most people lose control of the proceedings when they get to Q&A and many a meltdown has been witnessed at this vital last impression juncture. Don’t allow someone’s random question content define your final impression or final message for the audience. I remember I was giving a presentation in Japanese, to an audience of HR professionals about how great Dale Carnegie training was and teaching them how to use some of the key human relations principles. It was going gangbusters, until we got to the Q&A. This very charming, well dressed Japanese lady in her early 70s put her hand up to ask a question and then highjacked the proceedings. For the next 10 minutes she launched into her own speech! My message had been forgotten completely by the end of that speech she gave. I need to get it back on track. That is why you need two closes. You must stay in command of the messaging and so the show ain’t over until you sing the last line of the wrap up after Q&A. Repeat your close so the last message they get is the one you want them to get. This is the mark of the pro! When you see a speaker wrap it up, call for Q&A and then just let things complete because time is up, they are still not there in their professional development. Keep an eye out for this when you hear people speak – see who is a real pro and who is still an amateur. Here are some Action Points to remember Prepare, Prepare, Prepare Open with Confidence Focus on a Few Key Points Support Ideas with Evidence Close with a Call to Action /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/29004738

Sales People Don’t Care 12/03/2023

Sales People Don’t Care Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc. The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”. Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales. Don’t miss it - selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about? Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy Siberian mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”. I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought the 3 series Beemer before the ink is dry? The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え). It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”. Sounds a bit woo, woo doesn’t it. Well it is sound business sense. This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what you want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? There I go again. Does this sound a bit too “let’s all hold hands around the a tree” California emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you. Even if somehow you do manage one sale, you will miss the key objective – the buyer’s re-order Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand. Wolf of Wall Street ring a bell here. That dude went to jail, which is where he deserved to go, for ripping all of those punters off and stealing their savings. He is out of jail now and is a sales trainer – the mind boggles at the thought. This is why people don’t trust salespeople. We have to prove we are different because we are judges guilty from the outset. The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was also a criminal. A criminal? Well, the criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks. Let me make a note to Sales Managers – do background checks!. He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a closer! I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson. Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie. He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong. What a wake up and smell the coffee moment for me. I realised how naïve and trusting I was. So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept. Change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own. If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a power personal brand. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28903063

How To Work Well With Difficult People 11/26/2023

How To Work Well With Difficult People People skills are really one of the key basics of leadership. Fortunately, leading is easy. Getting others to follow us is the tricky bit. I hope this isn’t new information, but not everyone is like you, so how do you get the team to follow you? Especially how to get others, who are so totally different from you, who are “difficult”, to follow you or support you? Central to working well with difficult people is understanding ourselves. Yes, they are difficult, but why do we think so? Isolating out the annoyance factors helps us to pinpoint how to handle situations where we react or possibly overreact. Reflecting on the past occasions when we have found difficulty with others is a good reality check. Here is a hint on how to do that – think of someone you consider difficult to work with, see that individual in your mind’s eye. Now ask yourself two simple questions – what is it about them precisely, that makes me see them as difficult? Second question – how have I typically reacted when dealing with this person, and what have been the consequences of those reactions? Take a pass on the psychobabble, but consider that this exercise offers up some critical insights into ourselves. Want change – start with you! Ask yourself, are there particular “hot buttons” that trigger a strong reaction, like being told “no” to something you seek. Do you notice that you quickly become defensive, take things personally or do you find yourself exemplifying “the best defense is attack” principle? Double check if your body language is screaming at that person, without you being completely aware of it? Do you just dismiss them and their “ilk” or do you try to at least see how it might appear from their perspective? Are you open to negotiation or compromise or are you a fully paid up, card carrying and patch wearing member of the “My Way Or The Highway” club? By the way, how are you with feedback – not good? With feedback, “We don’t know what we don’t know” is always a pain. Hearing unpleasant things about us from others is a bigger pain. “Nobody understands me!”- even further pain, when having to deal with idiots, people who lack our brand of common sense and basic nasties who have the temerity to want to argue the point. What can we do about it, because over time, the stress and tension will make us ill or possibly even kill us? Don’t try and change their world, start instead with yourself. Being generous with the benefit of the doubt will be a good starting point to help us tread an easier path through the various minefields in human relations. Look at the person and the situations which arise. Ask yourself, “what do I know about this difficult person that might help me understand the way they think or behave”? Where and how were they raised? What has been their set of life experiences that has channeled them into their habit patterns? Is it just an occasional thing - are they sad or mad? Is there something going on at home that is making them irascible? Is today’s flare up sourced by anger at their home situation and is it just oozing frustration into every fibre of their being? As a leader, it is always good to presume everybody you meet in life is carrying a heavy load. Think about your own troubles – perfection doesn’t last all that long and before you know it, stress begins to well up. Dale Carnegie's Principles to change behavior, without creating resentment, are a powerful and handy roadmap forward. Advice like “ask questions instead of giving direct orders” works well, because you invite them to have some influence and ownership over the decision. Another insight is to “call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly”. This is useful because it precludes people becoming defensive and locking themselves into inflexible positions to save their face. Actually “Let the other person save face” is another of the principles and good plain advice. Don’t win the battle and humiliate the other party. They won’t forget or forgive and you may lose the war over the longer game. Another principle, “Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest” is not so easy. However, if we really analyse that person and the personality drivers in play within them, we can find some common ground that will appeal to their self-interest and we can unite behind that to go forward. I recommend you read the classic he wrote called “How To Win Friends and Influence People” – it is just chock full of gems. Identifying typical current people issues and then applying the Principles to each case will make how to handle certain people an /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28790508

Develop Your Leadership SuperPower 11/20/2023

Develop Your Leadership SuperPower Job descriptions, performance reviews, incentive schemes, recognition programmes are often box ticking activities in organisations, which often lead nowhere. Overviewing these various systems and their execution may make the managers feel like they are earning their keep, but are they really contributing all that much to the required outcomes? Counting what the heads do, getting those heads to think and think together are different challenges and the latter necessitates cultivating people. Cultivating people is the “new black” for managers, as they must move up and into real leadership. So what is the difference between being a manager and a leader? There are many definitions but it doesn’t have to be complex. Leadership is all about creating environments that influence others to achieve the group goals, because people will willingly support a world they create. Management is the creation, implementation and monitoring of processes. People will willingly comply with a process that helps them succeed. Moving forward means designating the next level of achievement. In a busy life, with a deluge of emails every day, spiced up with endless meaningless meetings, we can sometimes forget what is the point to all of this, as we are totally consumed with activity. We need to set the vision for the team of where we want to be and what is the next level for us. It must be concrete, clear and well communicated. I ran across one the other day: “delivering extraordinary customer experiences”. Rather ambiguous – you could be delivering extraordinarily bad experiences to your customers! A bit more clarity needed back at HQ by the look of that one. It raises the point though, that clarity in the communication is key, if you want to get people behind your direction. Don’t kid yourself, semantics matter. So where possible, get buy in to the vision, such that it is a shared process. This may be difficult when “The Vision” is lofting down from on high, but there are always sub-visions for the work group, that can take it to a further concrete stage or which further clarify the main message for the reality facing the team. With a successfully shared vision, the troops cease seeing their role as robotic task completion and switch to results completion. How about down at your shop – is there a shared vision (or shared sub-vision), are the team focused on painting by numbers or on producing a group triumph, do they know what the designation is for the next level? We ask people to step up, but that also asks them to take on risks of the new or the different. The outcomes must be totally defined and clear, and the team must buy into achieving them in order to step out of their current mode and take on the risks of the unknown. “There be dragons” is a strong gravitational pull away from innovation or anything shiny and new. It must be countered by you, the leader. “Leadership” begins to include “self-leadership” when we have buy in and clarity, because it allows the team to be more self-directed, handling their available resources without the need for micro-management. We can all quote the buzz words such as “empowerment,” “empowered behavior” etc., but actually realising that desired state is another matter. The poor communication skills of those in charge are often the breakdown point. The “Vision Statement” penned by the CEO goes up on the wall in a nice frame, on expensive paper, safely protected behind glass and there for all to completely ignore from now on. No, no no! It has to live. If your people can’t quote the company, division or section vision on demand, from memory, you are not even on the first rung to having a real vision. If you can’t remember it you can’t live it. It is not a one-shot all dancing, all singing pronouncement and move on affair. It always amazes me, how often to you have to keep telling the team the same thing, for it to really permeate. The leader will certainly get tired of saying it all the time, but has to keep going because the listeners always take much longer than expected to absorb the content. It just points up the fact we are competing with a whole bunch of “other stuff”, for the real estate of cluttered minds. When you ask senior executives to identify the most significant personal characteristic needed by management, they will dutifully trot out “the ability to work with people”. Take a look at the expense line in your P&L – people are a huge component. Yet, so many leaders are woeful communicators. They are often promoted into position of accountability, on the basis they count. They are insular, brainy technical experts, they are CFOs who can’t grow but can watch the bottom line like a legend, they are the idiosyncratic salesperson who does it “my way”, but can’t teach it to anyone else. We need to teach these smart people how to be “people smart” – it is a different attitude and skill set. The executive decisions get carried out by people, but how much time does your leadership team spend building your people, as opposed to issuing directives, giving orders, providing technical guidance etc.? These activities are all about the “how” and zero on the “why”? Time to start work on some personal leadership, strongly communicating the “why” and getting the team to create a shared vision of your organisation’s better and brighter future. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28712518

Chasing Buyer “No” Replies 11/13/2023

Chasing Buyer “No” Replies Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work. We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it. Buyers though are a different case. They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us “no”. The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we deal with the rejection. In Japan, the two areas our clients flag with us for special attention in sales training for their team are around understanding the client’s needs and asking for the order or closing, as it is commonly referred to in sales parlance. The poor questioning skills are a result of salespeople wanting to tell the buyer a lot of stuff about the features, but not bothering to ask some well designed questions to uncover what their clients need. This in itself will explain a lot about why buyers say “no”. If we don’t properly understand what they need, then how do we suggest solutions that make sense and motivate the buyer to action? The two problems are closely linked. Even assuming that the questions are well thought through and that the solution selected is professionally conveyed to the buyer, they may still say no. This is because the buyer’s hesitations have not been properly addressed. There was something unclear or unsatisfactory in what they just heard from the salesperson and they are not convinced this is the right solution to their problem. This is why a “no” will certainly be forthcoming, especially from Japanese buyers. Risk aversion is a fundamental part of the fabric of Japan and buyers more than most, observe this in distinct detail. They would rather give up on something better, if they thought there was a possibility their decision might bring some stain on their record. Failure is hard to recover from in Japan. There are no second chances here. People have learnt the best way to avoid failing is to take as few decisions as possible. Especially any decisions which can be traced back to you. Best to have a group decision, so the blame can be spread around and no one loses their job. Actually that works like a charm here, so no one wants to buck the system Having given the sales presentation, many salespeople in Japan simply don’t ask for the order. They get to the end of their spiel and they just leave it there. The buyer is not asked for a decision, it is left vague on purpose, so that if it is a “no” then that will not have to be dealt with directly. The Japanese language is genius for having circles within circles of subtle obfuscation. The end result is a “no” but nobody ever has to say it or hear it. To get a sale happening, the buyer has to do all the work here in Japan, because the salespeople don’t want commit, to take the plunge and ask for the order. If they get a “no”, their feelings of self worth are impacted, they feel depressed, that they are failing. Not doing fully competent work or being highly productive, yet keeping you job is a pretty safe bet in most Japanese companies. The level of productivity amongst white collar workers is dismally low. Collective responsibility helps because it lessens the impact of personal inability to reach targets or make deadlines. Sales though is totally crystal clear about success and failure. It is very hard to argue with numbers – you either made the target or you didn’t. Sales is also a numbers game. You are not going to hit a homerun every time, so the number of times becomes important. You will have certain ratios of success that apply right through the sales value chain and the only way to increase your sales, is to improve these ratios. You have to up the ante, regarding the volume of activity. This sounds easy, but it isn’t when you are feeling depressed, insecure and plummeting in confidence. The key is to see sales in a different way. The increased volume of activity will even out the rejections. The way you think about rejection has to change. Rejection isn’t about you personally. Buyers don’t care that much about salespeople as people. They are rejecting your offer. As it is made today. In this part of the budget process. At this point in the economic cycle. In this current construction. At this price, with these terms. We haven’t shown enough value yet, to get a “yes’. As these aspects change, the answer can go from a “yes” to a “no” and from a “no” to a “yes”. That decision is irrelevant of the salesperson and how the buyer feels about them. These are macro and micro factors which can impact the decision one way or another. The answer is to see more people. In that way you can have a better chance of meeting a buyer for whom all the stars align and they can say “yes”. At the same time, you need to keep working on getting better, at showing more value. You need to harden up and become tougher. Whatever you are selling, you always need to remember your AFTOS mantra: “ask for the order stupid”. Never say no for the buyer and understand that “no” is never “no” or forever. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28608293

What the Pro Public Speakers Do 11/05/2023

What the Pro Public Speakers Do When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored. There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well. It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice. This is where the majority of lousy, boring and uninspiring speakers trip up. They don’t rehearse or practice. Instead, they just unload on their poor unsuspecting audience. Here is a pro hint. Never practice on your audience! The global CEO of a major pharma company jetted into town recently and spoke at a chamber of commerce event. The presentation was well structured and flowed in a way that was easy to follow. The slides were professional and clear. He spoke fluently, wasn’t reading from any script and instead was talking about the key points up on screen. When we got to Q&A, he repeated the question, so that everyone could hear it and then answered it. He did that while addressing the entire audience, rather than just speaking to the inquirer. When he did not have the information referred to in a question, he admitted it straight up, without trying to fudge it. This is not an admission of weakness, rather it builds trust and credibility. I doubt he did any rehearsal for that audience, because it was a stump speech he has given so many times he was entirely comfortable with the content. Could he have done better? Yes, he could have added more stories into the presentation. A few vignettes from the exciting world of white lab coats, where they were developing new medicines to save humanity, would have been good. He could have delivered it with a bit more passion. It was professional, but it came across as a stump speech. He was supremely comfortable delivering it and that is one issue we have to be alert to. When we are too comfortable, we can sometimes slip ourselves into cruise control mode. We should keep upping the ante each occasion, to try and see how much further we can push ourselves as presenters. Another function I attended was an industry awards event and the main VIP guest made some remarks before announcing the winners. Humour is very, very hard to get right. For every professional comedian we see on television, there are thousands waiting tables and trying to break into the industry. When you see humour done well by a public speaker, you are impressed. You need to have material that is funny for a start. Then you have to be able to deliver it so that people laugh. This sounds easy, but as professional comedians know, the timing of the delivery is key. So are the pauses and the weighting of certain key words. It has to be delivered fluently, so no ums and ahs, no hesitations, no mangling of words. Getting the facial expressions to match what is being said is also tricky. Our humorous VIP was delivering some lines that he had used a number of times before, so he knew his material worked. It is always good when big shots are self depreciating. We can more easily identify with them, when they don’t come across as taking themselves too seriously. “I am good and I know it”, doesn't work so well with the rest of us. How do you become humorous as a speaker? Where do we acquire our humorous material? We steal it. Our speaker had probably heard those jokes somewhere else and just topped and tailed them for this event. Very cleverly, he made them sound personal, as if these incidents had really happened to him. This is important in order to build a connection with the punters in the audience. So, when you attend an event and you hear someone make a good joke or tell a humorous story, don’t just laugh and reach for another chardonnay. Quickly write it down and later start using it yourself. The secret though is to practice that humourous telling on small audiences, to test you have the delivery just right. The cadence is important and that takes practice. I would guess our speaker had told those jokes many times before. It is fresh for us, but for him it was well within his range of capability. This is what comedians do. They introduce new material in small venues, filter out what doesn’t work and then they bring the best gags to the big stage. We should do the same. Another place where we can find humour is in what we say that makes an audience laugh. When I returned to Japan in 1992 as a diplomat and Trade Commissioner, I was called upon to do a lot of public speaking in Japanese. I began with constructing jokes that I thought were humourous. This was a pretty bold step, because I had no track record in being funny in English, let alone in Japanese. These jokes of my own crafting all bombed completely. However, I would say something, not meaning to be funny and the Japanese audience would laugh. I took note of that reaction and realised that was a joke. I would incorporate that into my other talks. Over a long period of time and a lot of speeches, I built up a stock of these humorous sprinklings of pixy dust that worked with Japanese audiences. It was refreshing to see two competent speakers in action recently and it is certainly a skill that all of us can improve in. There are some simple basics of speaking we need to concentrate on - prepare, rehearse, learn – repeat! /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28505012

Don’t Work For Idiots In Sales 10/29/2023

Don’t Work For Idiots In Sales Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous stretch targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment. We often get into sales by accident. There are not many varsity business courses in sales. There is sales training available, provided by companies like ourselves, but often this is not offered by the employer. The assumption is you look after yourself. We won’t invest in you and what’s more, we will fire you, if you can’t make your numbers. “Churn em and burn em” is the dominant ethos. The successful salespeople ride the favourable market conditions through until the inevitable downturn. If they survive that experience, they often wind up being the sales manager. Battlefield commands come on the back of your officer being removed by HQ or by the enemy. There is a high turnover rate in sales both when people fail or succeed. In either case, you are out the door and off to somewhere else. The survivors who don’t want to move on the greener pastures, often become the bosses. They continue the toxic culture regardless of how stupid it is, because that is all they know. It worked for them, so it is supposed to work for you. The client in all of this is the “mark”, to be harvested, to have their cash extracted and then abandoned to their own devices thereafter. Often in bad sales organisations, area salespeople have to cover big territories. This is because they can only hit that one market once. They are selling a lie. Their product is not matched by good quality relative to the high price they charge. They have to scarper with the cash and get out of Dodge. They are like sharks, which have to keep swimming around in order to breathe. Who decided it would be like this? Not the salesperson. They join a company and then discover the disconnect between the cost and the value, between the public rhetoric and the internal reality. By this time they have already left their previous job and are treading water to make commission and not drown in debt. They are always just one week from financial oblivion, so they have to keep dancing while the music is playing. The sale’s evil ethos is the company’s making and this is where the blame should lie. Bad sales organisations are inevitably run by bad sales managers. The reason is simple – “birds of a feather, flock together”. Good sales managers don’t want and don’t need to be involved in a business where they have to survive by fleecing the buyers. They see a bigger better picture. They have ability and talent and a war chest of funds to offer them choices. There is an old Japanese saying that prescribes “the fish rots from the head”. Consequently your company’s bad sales boss, environment, culture and sales ethos stinks. If you are a “good” person in sales, swimming in a toxic cocktail of sales hell, then get out of there. You are not in a position to reform that business or the management. It didn’t get that way by accident. Now you may not be able to move immediately, but for the sake of your health and mental well-being, don’t put up with crap from idiots. As soon as you can, move on. In the interim, strenuously begin educating yourself. There are tons of books, free videos and podcasts on how to do a better job serving clients. Access them. Feed your mind with the positive, because for sure you are being killed by the negative environment surrounding you. If you have the funds, then get yourself into some professional sales training. By whatever ethical means, make yourself more skillful and valuable. I often refer to the word kokorogamae in sales, which I translate as our “true intentions”. Don’t let any toxic environment or people corrupt your true intentions. We should have a very clear guiding principle, a light on the hill and that should be to serve the best interests of the customer. That means we have their success as the catalyst for our own success. If we make them successful, we will get reorders, a steady stream of work and we will be earning good commissions, building up our financial security. Money elicits options. This is not instant and means creating a different type of client relationship with a longer sales cycle. The share of wallet increases over time when there is a good track record and strong trust. The lifetime value of the customer becomes an integral part of the equation. This type of sales environment only exists in companies with a correct kokorogamae. If your company is not like that, then do not become a lifer pirate, get out of there and save your career, health and mental well being. Action Steps Decide that your time in this toxic environment must come to an end Study sales diligently while you are organising your great escape Make your kokorogamae a clear vote in favour of serving the client /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28452167

Elegantly Accepting Your Kudos 10/22/2023

Elegantly Accepting Your Kudos You want to promote your business or organisation, so that you can be more successful. A genius idea pops up amongst the brain trust over a few drinks after work – why don’t we enter the Business Awards? Someone has to win don’t they, so the odds are fair. Anyway, there is no downside is there? True but there can be, if you don’t fully think this through. I don’t mean the requirement for polishing the application or assembling the data in support of the claims being made. I am talking about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory on the winner’s dais. When you win, you are invited up on to stage. The cameras are rolling, the lights are flooding the arena and the music is pumping. You are pumping too, baby. It quickly occurs to you that hammering the booze on the table to instill some bonhomie amongst the troops was a good idea at the time, but now you need to pull yourself together. You fight your way to the stage, negotiating your way through the labyrinth of socially distanced round tables. Before you know it, you and the team have assembled on stage to receive the ovation from the crowd. In a moment, the MC announces you are about to be handed the cool looking trophy from the key VIP guest of the evening. The crowd now goes quiet as you draw up to the stand microphone of the stage grasping the prize in your hand. A thousand eyes are fixed on you, awaiting your acceptance speech. You fluff it. A ragged series of ums and ahs are punctuated by disoriented rambling highlighting no cohesion of thoughts, concepts or ideas. You are now sweating bullets. Multiple beads of perspiration start to run down your face, your pulse is surging, you realize this is a disaster and mentally start looking for the exit. Thanks to you, all the tuxedoed dandies present have enjoyed their modern day Colosseum bread and circuses moment. Once the victim has been disposed of by public humiliation, everyone just returns to their table chatter. You are not forgotten though. You are now outed as an incompetent, who can’t string three words together. Your tenuous reputation is shredded and the trophy somehow feels less weighty and magnificent in your grasp. You recall having seen this before haven’t you. Underprepared speakers making a complete hash of it. Don’t try and wing it. Think ahead and be properly tooled up. There are some key basics you cannot neglect. Under no circumstances mention you are nervous to the audience, even if you worry you are about to pass out and faint. Fall full flat out on your face, but don’t apologise for your lack of preparation for this speech. Don’t begin by bringing up your totally bereft skill set in giving speeches. The audience can see that for themselves. Don’t try to make nervous jokes to release the tension you are feeling in the moment. You are clearly pathetic, not funny. Begin where you should. Thank the chief VIP, the Chamber or Business Association and the judges for awarding you this magnificent trophy and great honour. Congratulate your vanquished opponents with great generosity extolling their virtues and achievements. Next take this opportunity to promote your organisation. That is why you applied in the first place isn’t it? Give them your thoroughly rehearsed and well constructed elevator pitch on why what you do is vital to mankind and the future of the universe. This needs to be tight, taut, terrific with no fluff. When you thank the people who have made this happen in the team, make a short personal remark about each. Taro who stayed late so many nights, catching the last train home to get the project completed on time. Megumi for her total dedication to the care of the clients. Daisuke for his rousing leadership of the sales team when things looked grim. Mari and her team of angels in the back office who somehow managed to hold the whole thing together through thick and thin. Finally, thank your family and friends who have supported you. If you become emotional at this point, don’t worry, whip out your handy hanky, wipe your eyes and just keep going. We will love you for it. Wrap it all up with a rousing call to action for the crowd. Encourage them to play a bigger game and maximise their potential here in this wonderful, exciting special country of Japan. Thank the organisers once again, wave the trophy high while moving away from the microphone stand, to signal you have finished. Now quietly call the team together to join you and the VIP, as you all pose for the photographers with the trophy. Then get off the stage, order the champagne, you are done! Before the event you need to prep yourself. Think through the award presentation component of the evening. Thoroughly prepare what you want to say, rehearse it many times, time it to make sure it isn’t too long. One final piece of advice is to stay off the booze, until you actually win. Good luck! /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28385672

301 Your Face Is More Powerful Than Any Screen 10/15/2023

301 Your Face Is More Powerful Than Any Screen We have all seen it. The presenters face is expressionless, wooden, devoid of emotion or life. It is usually well paired with a horrific monotone vocal delivery, to really kill off the audiencecompletely. Presenting is a serious business, so these presenters present a very serious physiognomy. Somehow, scowling is thought to be good too, to show the gravitas these heavyweights bring to the occasion. These are powerful people, who by definition, must look powerful. Technical people, in particular, love this no frills approach and smiling is definitely well off their list of possibilities. To be fair, there are presentations where levity, smiling, frivolity are totally inappropriate. A remembrance ceremony for the fallen heroes and heroines in battle, would be an occasion for an austere face. Losing all the shareholder’s value through some idiocy would be another. A serious face however, doesn’t have to be an expressionless face. Recalling lost loved ones in a heartbroken community, can see the presenter’s face stricken and tortured with pent up emotions. When I gave eulogy for my mother at her funeral, my face was ashen and pained. In business though, in most cases, we can use our faces as an additional communication tool with our audience. We are using tonal variety in our voice, our hands for gestures, our eyes for audience engagement. We should also be using our faces too. A raised eyebrow can speak volumes. It can indicate curiosity, incredulousness or doubt. Turning our face to the side and tilting our head to go with it, can show scepticism or cynicism. Pursing our lips together then pushing them forward in a pout shows disagreement or disapproval. Pulling our head back from the neck shows shock or surprise. Physicality is one of the tools available to the presenter. When you think about it we are incredibly active using our face in normal conversation. If we filmed you speaking and played it back you would be amazed at how much facial expression you are employing. Stand you behind a podium or put you on stage in front of an audience though and maybe all that natural communication ability sails out the window and is replaced by a wooden you instead. When we look at theatre performances, television, movies, comedic acts we can see facial tools being well employed to drive home messages. I enjoy the popular drama from Italy, Inspector Montalbano and the Italian culture really makes great use of the face to communicate emotions. They are just talking, but it looks like they are arguing and of course the gesturing is on fire. We should stop watching these shows just for the entertainment value and start re-watching them for what we can learn about how to employ our face more powerfully when presenting. In the same way, when we are speaking, we hit key words with a louder or softer volume for effect, we should start employing our face to do the very same thing. When you want to raise doubt about some proposition someone else is putting forward, look for a suitable facial expression to back up that message. When you want to appear sceptical of some idea, then bring your best sceptic face to the fore. When you want to look happy, a huge smile will do the trick to convey that feeling. This is very hard to coordinate when you are starting out. These days I have so much going on with my voice, eyes, gestures, body language I am not even aware of it. Watching myself on video with the sound turned off, I can see how much natural variety I am bringing to the talk. It wasn’t like that at the start. My very first public presentation in my life was in Japanese to the Sundai Yobiko cram school students who were forced to listen to me. I was so nervous, I managed to finish a 25 minute speech in 8 minutes. I am sure my face was not only wooden, but also bright red from all the stress I was feeling. Like anything to do with public speaking this facial involvement takes practice. Presenting in front of a mirror is a good chance to see how animated you are. Video is better though and these days everyone has a smart phone with a very good quality camera lens included. Try doing the same piece with repetition to see if you are bringing your face into the communication. Also check you are doing it congruently with the content you are addressing. Over time, you will start creating appropriate facial expressions for that piece of the content without even noticing it. To be a more effective public speaker, get your face more involved! /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28317806

300 Leadership Tough Love Won’t Cut It Anymore 10/08/2023

300 Leadership Tough Love Won’t Cut It Anymore In a previous episode, I mentioned a Spa magazine survey in Japan of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. The Lehman Shock in 2008 opened to door to job losses in larger companies, something which only had been possible in smaller firms in the past. The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear plant meltdown drove many businesses under. The Covid pandemic finished off renown restaurants and hotels and threw people out on the street to seek work, despite their years of loyalty. The sense of lifetime employment as a given has been removed and a brand new world of work has emerged. Feeling unappreciated is a construct of leadership. The Japanese system of hierarchy in companies has followed the lessons proffered during the military service experienced by those who participated in World War Two. Brutalisation by superiors was widespread and everyone was expendable. Postwar leaders in the West were also the graduates of the battlefield leadership system as well. Things changed in the late 1960s however and modern economies moved away from the old military models of leadership, to seek best practice based on research. Japan has not even started on that path yet. The post war years were a frenetic effort to rebuild a devastated economy and to catch up with the rest of the world. When I first came into contact with Japanese businesspeople, I remember their joy as Japan knocked off one Western economy after another, to climb in the rankings to the number two GDP in the world. The bubble economy saw Japan go completely crazy and lose all sense of proportion, as the 1985 Plaza Accord Agreement sent the yen into the stratosphere of supreme value and everything, everywhere was a bargain. I was back in Australia during that time and wondered why those lovely Japanese people I had met pre-bubble, were now replaced by these rude, arrogant, overbearing types? During all of this transition, there was no driver to change the management systems in companies away from the war-time model, because things had worked out pretty well. It wasn’t broken, so no fixing required and anyway nobody likes change because of all the risk attached to it, so steady as she goes. Here we are decades later and life has certainly changed, but the leadership mentality has not caught up yet. Bosses were schooled in the Tough Love Academy of Leadership. Communication, coaching, feedback, encouragement – all the key soft skills were never in that curriculum. You probably can’t beat Japan when it comes to hard skill education. Their perfectionism, combined with a relentless curiousity for small incremental kaizen style improvements is a wonder to behold. Soft skills were not so much of interest to the captains of Japanese industry. Japan is always bottom of the charts whenever firms do engagement surveys. Japan is the global leader in the bottom rung of microscopic scores for percentages of highly engaged staff. Yes, there are cultural issues with these surveys, given Japanese humility, conservatism and circumspection. But just ask any Japanese firm if they think the low scores are fiction and everyone agrees that directionally, they are correct. So we need some solid work here for Japan to catch up and join the rest of the advanced world of work. The HR function in Japan, apart from its policeman role in having the rules followed, is there to move you around the organization so that you can become a jack of all trades and a master of none. On The Job Training (OJT) is still the main methodology of leadership instruction. Just passing on what each boss experienced to the next generation, without any structure, excellence, best practice capture, design, doesn’t sound too smart, does it? Yet that is exactly the problem, not enough thinking has gone into what Japan needs from it’s leaders going forward. Soft skills and hard skills are both called for, but you need a mindset change to appreciate that they are both important. That Spa survey showed that the areas of greatest demand were for soft skills solutions. Have a good look around your own operation and see just how much time your leadership group are spending on encouraging, coaching, recognising and praising. My guess would be not a lot, because they simply don’t think these areas of attention are so important. What a lost opportunity. It is time to turn that around and get this country going. The pivot point is with the leaders. If we educate them to become professionals, then we set up a new generation of workers who expect their bosses to be supportive and make sure they feel valued. That feeling of being valued is the springboard to becoming highly engaged. That is a major mindset shift needed in Japan. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28254647

299 Don’t Forget Your Customers 10/01/2023

299 Don’t Forget Your Customers This is an old saying in sales and one we forget at our cost. We might have made the sale and then we keep moving forward. We get wrapped up in the intricacies of the getting other customers to commit and in the logistical details of delivering our previously sold service or product. Our schedule fills up quickly and we have filled it with the present and future, not the past. That customer we sold to gets forgotten in this busy life and they return the compliment and forget about us too. We know that creating new customers is more expensive on an acquisition cost basis and that selling again or selling more to our existing customers is easier than making a new sale. Why then don’t we do a better job of developing further business with our existing customers? We usually do a good job in the immediate post sales service period, but the key word there is “immediate”. We don’t schedule in the “just checking in “ contact, because we are too busy chasing down the new contacts. Now that the customer has had the benefit of our product or service, we don’t call back and ask, “How has it been going? Are there any subsequent issues that have arisen that we can help with or fix?”. A good rule to apply is always make the time to connect with the buyer. They will either be happy and we can see if they know others, who would also benefit. If they are unhappy, we can fix the issue for them. Silent, unhappy customers are not what we want, because we are killing our brand and our reputation without even knowing it. Clients may have cyclical needs when there is a certain cadence to their buying. Upgrades or replacements require follow up. When these are scheduled into our diaries, we can make sure to re-contact the client. It may be that there is no sequence logic and so we have to intentionally create a schedule, so that they don’t forget us. There are few things more disheartening then contacting an existing client to find they did have a need and they filled that need with our competitor’s solution. Ouch. I really hate having that conversation, I can tell you. We can add the client to our email mailing lists and they get updates. The problem is that they don’t read them or even notice them or they go into their junk mail box, so a “set and forget” approach is a bad idea. We have to be able to cut through all the clutter and noise of daily life to reach out to them, so that we stay top of mind. This is harder today, more so than it has ever been. There are so many emails, so much social media, so many meetings, no wonder our buyers get swamped. Have you ever had a new message notification flash up on the top of your computer screen and then disappear? You have to spend ten minutes going through all the possibilities to find where that message came from. Trying to get anyone on the phone these days is mind numbingly hard and it is like a miracle if you succeed. No one calls you back anymore either. Japan has a set pattern of seasonal gifts which are sent to clients for the express purpose of reminding them that they have not been forgotten. Depending on how many clients you have, this can become expensive and is probably easier for larger firms. A hand written thank you note on the anniversary of the business conducted with the client is not expensive and because hardly anyone gets postal mail anymore, it will stand out. Even though you can’t get people on the phone so easily, don’t just hang up. Don’t expect to get called back either, but always leave a voice message, so they hear your voice and understand you have been thinking of them. Some of my business contacts here tell me that their millennial employees avoid the phone like the plague, much preferring to text. It doesn’t matter, young or old, leave them a voice mail anyway. Sending relevant White Papers, books, reports, media clippings, videos, audio etc., are always good ideas, but you can’t leave this to chance. It is a good discipline to be looking for these items, with specific customers in mind. When you see something that will resonate with them, this is when you have to be disciplined to send it. This doesn’t have to be every month of course, but probably twice a year is a good practice, on top of the email blasts and newsletters that existing clients receive anyway. Making appointments with yourself, is one of the best ways to make sure we actually do the immediate and the sustained follow up. Good intentions are terrific, but planned, disciplined contacts are better. Choosing electronic or analogue systems is not the issue, the real key is having a system that delivers the updating, reminding process to the buyer. If we don’t have a system then we need to create one and the best time to start was yesterday. /episode/index/show/thecuttingedgejapanbusinessshow/id/28189268

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

TOPICS