The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • 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.
    copyright 2022
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Economics Management
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Episodes
  • 337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan

    337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan
    Feb 2 2025
    Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control. You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good. However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight. Why a street fight? Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules. “Oh, that’s not right” you might be thinking. “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on bareknuckle duking it out in public?”. That is correct but it is not a guarantee. When doing public speaking, there are different personality types assembled in the room. In Japan, often the English language presentation occasions are like mini-United Nations’ assemblies, in terms of national representation. Different social norms apply in countries apart from your own. My French friends tell me the French educational system promotes critique of statements and ideas and that is seen as an illustration of superior intellect. My fellow Australians are often sceptical, doubting and don’t hesitate to mention it, in a direct assault on what has just been said. There are also different personality types in the room. Some people are naturally aggressive and want to argue the point, if the speaker has the temerity to say something they disagree with. What is considered rude, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour is a relative judgment depending on where you grew up, how you were educated and how you individually see the world. Even in Japanese society, there are occasions where there is heated arguement and a lot of the typical Japanese restraint is out the window. As the speaker, we are pumped full of chemicals when we get up to present. If we are nervous, then the flight or fight adrenaline chemicals are released by the Amygdala inside our brain. We cannot stop this, but we can control it. It is interesting that if this state is held for a long period of time, we lose the feeling of strength and have a sense of weakness. A forty minute speech is a long time to be in a heightened state and by the time we get to the Q&A, we may be feeling denuded of strength. Just at the moment when we come under full force street fighting attack. The face of the speaker is a critical indicator during the Q&A. I caught myself shaking my head to indicate disagreement with what was coming my way in the form of a question during the Q&A. Without initially realising it, I was sending out a physical sign that I wasn’t accepting the questioner’s bead of disagreement to what I had been pontificating. From an audience point of view, this looks like you are inflexible, closed to other opinions and just dismissive of anyone with an opinion that differs from your own. Even if you are not a rabid head shaker like I was, the expression on your face may be speaking volumes to your audience. You might be displaying a sceptical visage of doubt and rejection of what is being said before you have heard the whole argument out. You might even be pumping blood into your face so that it goes red in colour. There is a female businesswoman I know here, whose skin goes bright red when she is in the public eye and begins to look like one of those warning beacons. There is probably nothing she can do about that, but it is definitely not a good look. Or maybe your general demeanour is one of disdain for the questioner and you look arrogant and disrespectful of alternative opinions. Given the chemical surge leading to denuding of strength I mentioned earlier, we may look like we are defeated by the questioner. This impacts our credibility. We need to be showing we are true believers in what we said and are fully committed to that line of argument. We don’t want to appear like we have collapsed in the face of pushback during the Q&A. Maintain a brave front, even if it is all front. The audience won’t know the difference. Nodding during the questioning is also a big mistake. We do this in normal conversation, to show the speaker we are paying attention to them. Unfortunately, this bleeds over into public speaking events as well. I learnt this when I did media training. The television media love it when you are nodding, because they can take that bit in the editing and transpose it to sync with the voice of the person disagreeing with you and it appears you are accepting their argument. Very sneaky isn’t it. When you pop up on the TV replay agreeing with your questioner attacking all that you have said, it is too late. Even if there is no TV there, don’t look like you are agreeing with the questioner and control that nodding right from the start. So during Q&A maintain a totally neutral expression on your face and don’t allow you head to nod. If you feel anxiety from the question, take some secret slow deep ...
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    13 mins
  • 336 Team Glue Insights In Japan

    336 Team Glue Insights In Japan
    Jan 26 2025
    Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the recession. Usually, communication skills and people skills were not prominent in their rise to this position of trust. How do we handle such a contradiction? What does it take to be successful as a team leader? Here are nine different adhesives to help glue the team together. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain When we criticize people for mistakes or poor performance, they stop listening to us and use all of their brainpower to marshal their defense or assemble their excuses, about why it isn’t their fault. We have created a barrier with them and they are in denial. The scolding, harsh direct approach may make us feel better but it leads nowhere useful, so don’t bother. Give honest and sincere appreciation Snowing staff with false praise or fake appreciation doesn’t work. People have well-tuned gauges for flattery. When they detect it, they do two things simultaneously: they ignore it and they don’t ever fully trust the perpetrator. They are saying to themselves, “Do you really think I am that dumb?”. Instead, we need to become “good finders”. Look for what people are doing well and recognise it. When we give appreciation, be very specific about what they did well, this makes it real and believable,. Look for strengths to develop, rather than trying to pull people down because they are not perfect. Arouse in the other person an eager want As leaders we want a lot of things to happen. Our targets, accountabilities and directives from above drive us. It can very quickly become all about “me” and what “I” want. Others are not that excited about what we want compared to what they want for themselves. If we can coalesce what we want with what others want we will do a lot better in terms of getting cooperation and achieving our desired outcomes. This is a communication skill we absolutely need to master. Become genuinely interested in other people We are all firmly attached to ourselves. We are the center of our universe and we want all things that are good to flow to us. As the leader though, you have to flip that self-absorption and get focused on your people. You can work 100 plus hours a week, but your team of 10, only working a 40 hour week can out work you with four times the input of hours. So working 100 hours yourself is dumb and getting your team fired up and working at peak performance is smart. Why would they do that? Because they feel there is something attractive in it for them. They feel that way because the leader has been an excellent communicator to explain the connection between hitting their own goals and hitting the firm’s goals. They are committed because they trust the leader. When Dale Carnegie did it’s global study on the emotional drivers of engagement, they found that “feeling valued” by the immediate supervisor was the trigger to having people become highly engaged. You have to know what your team values, in order to help them understand they are highly valued. Your personal values are only interesting to you. Their values, for them, are the key. Once you are really genuinely interested in your team, you will naturally understand what they value. Then you can arrange for good things to happen for them, based on what they want, not what you want. Smile We think we smile, but we do it more rarely than we imagine. We are swimming through a flood tide of emails, meetings and reporting every week. We are under pressure to produce the goods. Our internal rivals are nipping at our heals, our external competitors are making life hell. It becomes hard to smile in the face of difficulties. What our team sees is a serious face, maybe an explosive face, when the pressure gets too much. Our mood every day is the barometer of how the team feels. If we are stressed out, we transfer that stress to everyone and we take their mood straight down. We have to be up, regardless of the pressure, the irritations, the stress. Remember to smile and pass this on to your team, to keep their mood positive. Remember names Presumably you can remember your team’s names. However, in a big organisation that may not be that easy. In Japan, in larger operations, it is interesting that often colleagues can’t remember their workmate’s personal name, only their family name. You need to send an email and you ask, “what is so and so’s personal name?”. The answer is often, “I don’t ...
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    15 mins
  • 335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan

    335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan
    Jan 19 2025
    Enterprise killers can include Customer Service. We know that all interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with AI robots or in-store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, ambitious, ever upward individuals, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be the epitomy of customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determine our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of education, rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. As the leader, to get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up in the clouds, at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. Are you a “good work finder” or the opposite? We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. In this way, the trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too hard driving, bottom line focused and serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the double standards, miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Are you self-aware enough? Bosses are often great order givers but poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know....
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    27 mins

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