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For succeeding in business in Japan you need to know how to lead, sell and persuade. This is what we cover in the show. No matter what the issue you will get hints, information, experience and insights into securing the necessary solutions required. Everything in the show is based on real world perspectives, with a strong emphasis on offering practical steps you can take to succeed.
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THE Leadership Japan Series is powered with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The Series is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of leadership, who want to the best in their business field.
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I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology. Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses. Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry. He also has his own company to promote as well a…
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Tough Love Or Fake Praise To Motivate Staff In Japan This tough love or fake praise alternative is a dubious construct. Are these two alternatives really the only options? For some leaders they may feel that the staff are getting paid to do a professional job and their corresponding need is to get on with it. The boss doesn’t need to be pandering t…
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Focus is under constant attack. The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor. Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable. That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics. The leader is supposed to be defini…
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APAC always ranks low in global engagement surveys. At the very bottom of the APAC calculation sits Japan. Part of the reasons are language and cultural. The translations from English can sometimes be off the mark and lead the Japanese to score lower. I always recommend carefully checking the translations to try to tighten them up and make the mean…
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Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along. Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale? This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction was…
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Alan Mulally has had a very successful career at Ford and Boeing. Over his 45 years as a leader, he developed an approach called “Working Together: Principles, Practices and Management System”. His number one principles is “People first….Love them up”. This type of declaration is simple to make, but not that easy to live when you are facing quarter…
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At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able t…
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I was having lunch with an expat client who has been here about a year and a half. We were talking about people not performing. In passing conversation, I happened to mention that incompetence is not an acceptable reason, as far as the Japanese courts are concerned, to fire someone. Japanese judges believe that it is our fault, because we have peop…
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For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway.…
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Effective leaders actively coach their staff and move them through four stages. In Phase One, they create a psychologically safe environment. In Phase Two, they engage the team members. In Phase Three, they evaluate the response to those engagement activities and finally, in Phase Four, they empower their subordinates. Let’s choose some of the most…
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Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore. Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts. Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it. A nerdy lovefest on th…
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Ideas are free and sometimes frivolous. We can brainstorm anything we like and we will come up with a bunch of ideas. Often that is where things grind to a shuddering halt. I have been in those rooms, where we covered all the walls with ideas great and mighty. What happened thereafter? Nothing. In Australia, in the 1990s, the government tightened u…
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Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications. Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer. We can’t control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of producing revenu…
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Japan has a lot of wisdom to share and one of my favourites is to not start with the solution to a problem. In Japan, the idea is to start with making sure you have the right problem to solve. This is not easy, because often we are super busy and moving at warp speed all the time, so just jumping in to fix a problem sounds like the best approach. T…
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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 …
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Founded in 2000, Baidu has 39,800 employees and is one of the largest global AI and internet companies. Based in China, its major success has been its search engine business. Its quarterly revenues ending June 2024 were $4.67 billion, so it is a substantial company. The Head of Public Relations and Vice-President, Ms. Qu Jing, posted a video on soc…
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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 p…
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The era of the boss who had done all the tasks in the section and was the main expert on the business has well and truly passed. Today, it is more of a team effort and there are a lot more specialisations required than in the past. Collaboration is the key to creativity by grouping all the brain power in one place and unleashing it to solve the pro…
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We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain. The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project. These are normally rat…
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The leader has a different role to that of the manager. The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget. The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people. If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything. Obvi…
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We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience. What makes the difference? The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner. Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life. We see this with music. The same l…
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As the boss, we are always super busy. We have the management of the team and the results to work on. Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality. At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building …
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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 unde…
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Managers manage. That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality. The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities. Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for th…
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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…
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There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team. Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences. One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan. I should really c…
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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 …
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Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to…
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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 cui…
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Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results. This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land. A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very…
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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.…
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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 …
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It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan. They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions. All goes according to plan, just like at home. Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the mee…
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I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO. This is up from 21% in 2019. Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not dr…
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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 …
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It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it? Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right? I told them everythin…
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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 …
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Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment. Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer. That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect. Mid-career hires were frowned u…
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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…
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Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan. Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach? Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war. The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their col…
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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 co…
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As leaders, we are busy bees. We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules. The upshot i…
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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…
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There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area. Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you. My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound …
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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 equal…
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You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication. What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it? Well you would be wrong! Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often …
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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…
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Leaders may not even be aware that they are poor listeners. They are very focused on telling others what to do. Being time poor, they are very focused on their own messaging, rather than the messaging efforts of others. In the war for talent in Japan, that could be a fatal move. One of the biggest factors driving engagement in Japan is the feeling …
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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 h…
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