The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

De: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Resumen

  • 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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Economía Gestión Gestión y Liderazgo
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Episodios
  • 343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic

    343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic
    Mar 16 2025
    Public speaking takes no prisoners. I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty. It comes up though. The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year. Are you ready to meet the challenge? There are some key components we must assemble. There must be one clear and compelling message. In a speech like this, we can’t rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing. They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused. It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose. We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say. Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments. Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people’s emotions. A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic. We need to hit the bullseye of what grabs people’s hearts. This is delivered through stories. We take people on a journey of our construction. We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think. This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message. Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people’s hearts and minds. We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience. Ideally, they can see these people in their mind’s eye. They might be people they have actually met or have heard of. They may be historical events, legendary figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience. In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event. About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing coastal communities, of the chaos and destruction. I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point. We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real. We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author’s creation, if the words create pictures. We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place. We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive. We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night. This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant. They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story. The delivery is where all of this comes together. It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen. There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect. This is not some dubious, dodgy trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters. No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through controlled exaggeration. Our speaker in Phuket, toward the end of his talk, dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire pushups on his fingertips. I don’t know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength. It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk. There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity. Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic. The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message. There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end. Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling...
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    12 m
  • 342 Success As a Leader In Japan

    342 Success As a Leader In Japan
    Mar 9 2025
    Being the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired. The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves of the stacks in the University library or other libraries in town. There was a physical card index system to help you find information, although browsing book spines was the fastest method of locating relevant tomes. Today, we have the entire holding of libraries digitized and available for discovery through advanced search tools. We have search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube and now AI platforms to help us find what we need to know. There are powerful publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok which floodlight information to us, using crowd sourcing of knowledge. We have email connecting us globally 24/7, we have video recordings, live streaming of events, podcasts, etc., all drowning us in information. My 23 year old son’s generation have had to learn how to swim in the floodtide of data, how to analyse, synthesise, select only what is relevant, reliable and credible. Voice commands have replaced keyboards and AI is speeding up the process of access. Even the single, most powerful savant cannot withstand this data flood, cannot keep up with the publishing platforms, cannot do it all alone. Teamwork, the distribution of labour based on finite specialties, crowd sourcing of information and ideas is now a must. Most leaders were not raised in this maelstrom of confusion and over-reaching and struggle just to keep up. We were more or less able to have a superior grasp of subjects, better information than our followers, expert authority and greater specialisation to justify us being the boss. Today, we cannot know it all or do it all by ourselves. In any boss/follower situation, as you climb the ranks you get further and further away from the coalface and have to live the market reality absorbed by osmosis from your people. The flood of information makes that imperative even more pressing. The problem is are you and the other leaders in your organisation any good at coalescing the team’s total power? Are those at the top able to develop people further to make them highly valuable experts supporting the growth of the enterprise? In Japan, the middle management echelon has been crushed by technology, too much data and the democratisation of data challenging their position power. Further, the speed of modern business is being propelled forward in asteroid catching slingshot mode, by instant communications and the widespread flattening of layers in organisations. In Japan, the gradual rise through the ranks, where you were coached by your bosses up the corporate rungs, until you got into a leadership position has been collapsed into only a few rungs today. Your erstwhile bosses had the time to develop their people. Today, be you expat or local, you as the boss in Japan, don’t have any time to do that. You keep adding spinning plates to be kept in motion, as you flit from meeting to meeting, interspersed by deluge email, relentless social media and phone calls on your mobile at any hour of the day. Your “coaching time” has been compressed into barking orders and giving direction to the team. You have no time for doing much brainstorming, because you just have no time. Anyway, the brainstorming method you are using is almost 100% ineffective anyway, so it probably makes no difference. You may as well do a few more emails instead. Actually, it does make a difference though, compared to what needs to be done. The bosses can’t do it all by themselves anymore. They don’t have all the key data and insights. They are perilously time poor, distracted, stressed and busy, busy, busy. They need to have the support of the team to get all the work done and they need the team to be engaged to care about getting it all done. People quality is an issue and only going to get worse as Japan’s demographic decline means anyone with a pulse will be hired. People who just turn up to work in Japan, waiting for their turn to rise up through the ranks, based on ...
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    13 m
  • 341 Don't Get Sabotaged By Your Colleagues When Selling in Japan

    341 Don't Get Sabotaged By Your Colleagues When Selling in Japan
    Mar 2 2025
    Sales is a nightmare. It is usually a solitary life. You head off to meet customers all day. Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can’t do on-line. Japan is a bit different. Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client. If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person. This is a country of on-the-job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations, there is more of a tendency to send more than one person to the sales meeting. Often, there is a need for a technical person or someone with highly specialised knowledge to attend the buyers’ meeting. This can present some issues if there is no plan for the meeting. I was coaching a salesperson recently who related a horror story to me. The person in question is relatively new to sales, so still finding their way. A more experienced salesperson from a different division was joining the meeting. The intention was to provide more than one solution for the buyer. Without any prior discussion, the accompanying salesperson offered 70% off the pricing in exchange for a volume purchase, in order to grow the relationship. Hearing this from him I was so shocked. I nearly blew my coffee out through my nose. There are so many things wrong with this vignette. These are both salespeople on a base and commission arrangement. One salesperson is hacking into the commission of the other, for a product line-up they don’t represent. This is outrageous behaviour. If you are in that sales meeting and your partner blurts out a combustible like that, you cannot reel it back in or reduce its toxic lethality. It is stated, out on the wild now and you have to live with that statement having been uttered by your side. This was first meeting too, so the damage is even worse. Now the client automatically discounts any rack rate or stated pricing by 70%, because that is what you have trained them to do. When you are in a first meeting in Japan, it would be reasonably rare to even get into pricing. The first meeting has some fixed requirements. The first is to build the trust with the buyer. They don’t know you, so they are suspicious. They are not sitting across from you thinking, “oh goody, here is someone who can help our business to grow”. They are not sure if your word can be trusted, whether you are smart enough to deal with them or if they like you. These outcomes take a good chunk of time to achieve and doing so in one meeting is being overly confident. You also have to understand if there is any point in talking at all. Do you have what they need? In order to make that judgement, you must be asking them highly intelligent questions. What are they doing now? Where would they like to be? If they know that, then why aren’t they there already? What will it mean for them personally if this goes well? We have to be running a scanner over them to understand their needs and then match it up with our catalogue of solutions. All of this takes time. We usually only get an hour with the buyer in Japan, so we need to grab as much information and insight as we possibly can before we have to high tail it out of there. Before we do so though, we must set the date and time for the follow-up meeting to present the solution. Don’t wait - do it right there and then or we may never get back into their busy, busy diary. Back at the lab we brew up the perfect solution and craft it into a killer proposal. Now we go back and present the solution. They may want us to email it to them, but with every fibre in our body we resist that option. We never ever want to be sending a naked, unprotected proposal to the buyer. It needs us right there alongside it, to underline the value attached to the pricing and deal with any questions or misunderstandings which may emerge. We want to read their body language very carefully when they react to what we have suggested. We only talk price in the second meeting and we never start with a discount. We offer the set price and this is the anchor that sets the terms of the discussion. We may drop the price in exchange for a volume purchase, but by 70%? That is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while in sales. As it turns out, I know the guilty party in this case, so it is even more shocking. They should have had more common sense. The problem is they state it and there is nothing you can do. Common sense is not common. The horse has bolted for our hero in this story, but the rest of us should all take careful note. So don’t expect that the people accompanying you to have common sense. Now this is especially the case if they are selling a different line of product from you and they have no skin in the game concerning a heavily discounted sale of your offering. Before the...
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    13 m

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