The Leadership Japan Series

De: Dr. Greg Story
  • Resumen

  • Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
    © 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved.
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Episodios
  • As A Leader How To Provide Guidance Your People Will Follow
    Mar 12 2025
    Giving people orders is fine and fun, when you are the leader. Not so great when you are on the receiving end though. Collaboration and innovation are two seismic shifts in workstyle that are fundamentally different from the way most leaders were educated. Command and control were more the order of business back in the day. Hierarchy was clear, bosses brooked no opposing ideas or opinions and everyone below knew their place. Things have moved on, but have the bosses moved on with it? Basically, the people you see in your daily purview are arraigned against a similar team in another steel and glass, high rise monstrosity somewhere across town. The quality of their teamwork and their ideas determines who wins in today’s marketplace. All the cogs have to intersect smoothly and the quality and speed of the output are the differentiators. Are your salespeople better than the opposition, is the marketing department punching above its weight, are your mid level leaders really rocking it? Clarity of purpose, inculcation into the cult of the WHY, dedication combined with smarts, make so much difference when competing with rival organisations. The leaders are what make the difference. They are hiring the people, training them and promoting them. There are so many deeper aspects to this. Is the culture profound or anaemic? Is talent recognised, rewarded and embraced as a competitive advantage or are we checking the age and seniority of the straps on the slave galley oars? What is the communication mode? Is this monologue boss city or are we engaging with a firestorm of vibrant, powerful ideas from below. Is the boss the chief know-it-all or the orchestra conductor, moulding the raw untrained troops into a stellar team? Communication is at the center piece to all of this. When the boss communication is focused on direct orders on the what and how all day long, we breed robots. Why don’t we push ourselves much higher and go for motivational leadership, where words capture souls and move mountains. The key to this pivot is to dump the olde style locker room halftime rousing call for maximum blood and guts in the second half. Today’s sports coaches are geniuses of psychology. They know their athletes’ temperaments, aspirations, fears and hot buttons at such an intimate level, that it is simply breathtaking. Bosses have to be in the same mould. Knowing each person thoroughly as an individual is the starting point. On top of that is knowing what they are trying to achieve. We become their cagy corner man in the ring, wiping away the blood and helping to focus their dizzy brains through the fog of the daily beatings going on in the marketplace. When we tell someone what to do, all we do is trigger negativity. Their cynical brains are burning with reasons why that is a bad idea. They feel the prime insult of being told what to do and consequently lack interest in executing a plan not of their own design, desire or creation. The reason they are so sceptical is that the plan is unleashed in a finished format, with no context or background attached. We need to get to the point tangentially with a short story. By the way, we don’t say, “I am going to tell you a story from my glorious past”. That would be amusing. I would love to see their reaction to that little doozy of an opener. No, instead we go straight into a place in time, to a location they can identify, with people they probably will know and we spin a yarn, a true yarn, about what happened to us and what we learnt from it. This whole narrative is short, under two minutes. We certainly don’t flag our conclusion MBA executive summary style at the start. No, we are more crafty than that. We are like Iga Ninja, luring the listener into our web of charm. We expose the background that led us to an experience and viewpoint on a topic. At the very end, we give them the order, the action we want them to take and then we finish off with the benefit to doing it that way. Next comes the hard bit for olde style leaders like me. We ask them if they can see a way of taking that idea or method further and bettering it. The old ego can take a battering at this point, when they trot out their half baked and crappy ideas, with all the aplomb of tender, ignorant youth. That is why we make an important intervention. We say, “Get together with others, you select them and then together think about what I have said and come back to me tomorrow with your best ideas”. This momentum breaker is important, otherwise only first phase, shallow musings will spill out of their mouths. We have also forced them to collaborate with their peers, giving us a better chance to reap richer alternatives. In the end, they either adopt your suggestion as the best alternative or they adapt and improve on it. Either way, they have been given ownership of the next steps and so are more likely to execute it with...
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    11 m
  • Leadership Principles Are An Absolute Must
    Mar 5 2025

    Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and INSEAD Business School are all awesome institutions. My previous employer shelled our serious cash to send me there for Executive education courses. Classes of one hundred people from all around the world engaging in debate, idea and experience exchange. One of my Indian classmates even wrote and performed a song at the final team dinner at Stanford, which was amazing and amazingly funny, as it captured many of the experiences of the two weeks we all shared together there.

    When you get off the plane and head back to work, you realise that the plane wasn’t the only thing flying at 30,000 feet. The content of the course was just like that. We were permanently at a very macro level. The day to day didn’t really get covered and the tactical pieces didn’t really feature much. This isn’t a criticism because you need that big picture, but the things on your desk waiting for you are a million miles from where you have just been.

    Fortunately, there are some leadership principles which can cover off the day to day needs. Principle #22 is “begin with praise and honest appreciation”. Such an obvious thing, how could this even be mentioned as a principle? It may be obvious, but are you a master of this principle? We talk about providing psychological safety for our teams. Well that is great and just how do you do that, when you have pressure to produce results from above and are feeling the stress of the current business disruption? It is too easy to begin with an interrogation about the current state of play, the numbers, the revenues, the cash flows. How about if you started every interaction off with finding something real to praise about the team members. Not fakery but something real, that shows you are paying close attention to what they are doing well.

    Mistakes happen. Except in Japan. In Japan mistakes are not allowed and the penalties to career advancement are large. “Fail faster” might make you a legend in Silicon Valley but would see you cast out in Japan. That is why the entire population here are all ninjas at concealing any errors, so that the boss never finds out. How do we get innovation going if we can’t tolerate mistakes? That is one big reason why there is so little white collar work innovation in Japan.

    Principle #23 says “call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly”. Rubbing in it some one’s face that they screwed up is a pretty dumb, but universally adopted, idea by bosses. Principle #26, “let the other person save face” isn’t an “oriental idea”. It is a human idea and no one likes losing face in front of others and it doesn’t increase people’s engagement levels. In fact, is has them thinking about leaving for greener pastures. Principle #24 also helps, “talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person”. We want our team members to feel empowered to take responsibility, to step up and try stuff. That is how we create an innovation hub inside the organisation. If you have a hotbed of ideas from your team and the competition is still canning people who make mistakes, then you will win.

    Principle #25 is so powerful. “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders”. Bosses are staff super-visors, because we have super-vision. Probably true once upon a time in the olde days, but no longer the case. Business is too complex today, so we need to grow our people and to be able to rely on their ideas. If I spend all my time telling you what I think, I haven’t learnt anything. Bosses need to think of questions which will push the team’s thinking muscle hard and get people really engaged. Instead of laying our your thoughts, chapter and verse and falling in love with the sound of your own voice, try asking questions instead. After asking the question, shut up and let your people answer without interruption. It may be killing you, but do it. Being asked for your opinion and ideas is empowering. Maybe the boss has all the answers, great, but what if the staff have questions the boss hasn’t even thought about. In Japanese business, asking the right question is more valued, that having the right answer.

    All of these principles have things in common. They are common sense, but not common practice. They are super easy to understand, but devilish to execute consistently. They are game changers in our relationship with our staff. Having some leadership principles to live by just takes the action of thinking out of the equation. These become the reflex actions we take because they have become a habit. These are the types of habits we need to cultivate.

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    12 m
  • Leaders Need To Empty Their Cup
    Feb 26 2025
    Tokusan the scholar visited Ryutan the Zen Master to learn about Zen. Tokusan was a very smart fellow and very confident in his knowledge and experience. He was good at impressing others with his capabilities and many people looked to him for guidance and advice. After about ten minutes of conversation, Ryutan invited Tokusan to enjoy some green tea. As the Zen master poured the hot tea into the cup, the tea began to flood over the brim, but Ryutan kept pouring the tea. Tokusan became agitated and said to stop pouring, because the cup was already full. Ryutan then told Tokusan that he couldn't understand Zen until he emptied his own mental cup, to allow new ideas to enter. This is a famous zen story in Japan and we leaders are Tokusan. We can be convinced of our ideas and become stubborn and inflexible about departing from them. We have risen through the ranks based on our abilities, experience and results. We had to work things out for ourselves and our decisions were correct. Over time we came to believe in ourselves and our decisions and we would plough ahead regardless of what others might have thought. We have always had to overcome resistance. We are now in the leader danger zone. There is tricky line between knowing what you are doing and actually being correct. We became the boss because our previous ideas were proved correct and superior to what others were advocating. We have seen off the idiots, doubters, naysayers, critics and rivals. We have climbed the greasy pole and they haven’t. Everyone should listen to us and believe what we say, because we are right and they are wrong. Case closed. This is the classic hero journey favoured by the independent, tough, driven, Type A, alpha mammals. For a very long time this worked just fine. Business however has grown more enmeshed with technology changes. More complex organisations have arisen and operate at hyper speed. Also, a different animal has been entering our companies, coming in straight out of college. Are we actually able to deal with these unparalleled changes? Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution put more importance of adaptability than strength or brains. Are we maintaining our full cup and therefore not well placed to adapt? Are we trying to do it all by ourselves? Many bosses are unable to hire smart people, because they cost too much, relative to the size of the cash flow in the company. Others won’t hire smart people, because they are scared of becoming a victim of future corporate internecine struggles, where they can be replaced with someone younger and cheaper. How exactly can we work through others? Covid-19 has disrupted business globally and the future is uncertain. How do leaders know what to do going forward? How do you know if your strategy is the correct one or not? Strong willed leaders see asking others for advice as a sign of timidity and weakness. They have attached their personal inner resilience to always knowing the correct answer, to being right, to being smarter and more savvy than everyone else. Complexity today exceeds the capability of one person leading the team to have all the answers. A superman or superwoman is no longer required. What happens though if you, as the leader, have low self awareness and can’t see that you need to empty your cup? Exactly how do you empty your cup? What should go inside the now empty cup? Lack of self awareness is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. Once that is accomplished then the emptying and refilling of the cup can start to happen. We have to face ourselves and ask why do we think we are able to keep operating as we have always done, when the current situation is more difficult. There are no indications we are ever going back to how things used to be? Emptying the cup requires humility, often in short supply with powerful leaders. Running faster, pushing aside and overtaking the other lemmings to ultimately be sprinting off the cliff, is of no help. This is the moment to stop and consider your own cup. Is it full of your baloney, that you have convinced yourself is correct? Have you surrounded yourself with “yes men” or the meek and compliant? Have you bullied everyone into submission? Are there ways to tap into more ideas and solutions than you can possibly produce by yourself? Are there people closer to the action on a daily basis, who will have greater and better insights than you can possibly have. Your frontline experience is way out of date by now, as you have arisen through the ranks over these many years. This is scary. Your self belief is what has driven you thus far and questioning it unravels a lot of your personal construct about your right to lead others. That is the old model of leadership, so let it go. The used by date has expired on that one. Empty your cup and your ego and find ways of learning more from others, including those who work for you and may ...
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    14 m

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