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
  • 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
  • 334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan

    334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan
    Jan 13 2025
    Don’t let your speaker introduction be a disaster. Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice. Once at the very start by the MC when they kick off proceedings and then later just before our segment of the talk. The MC’s role is quite simple. It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience. This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors. How big a risk taker are you? Are you relying on the MC to do the necessary research on you? Are you sure they can properly encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject? Most people in the MC role are not expert or trained speakers. Usually, they are clueless about this MC gig and just happen to have control over you for this brief interlude. They are probably too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of preparing your intro and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need grander highlighting than others. Be warned. It is always best to prepare your own excellent introduction. Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic. Don’t make it too long though, because we are in the Age of Distraction, where audience concentration spans are frankly pathetically brief. I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life. He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points, very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a single lengthy unit. I wasn’t the MC that evening, but the actual MC simply ignored the whole thing altogether, deposed their own role and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”. Well, yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail. Thanks to this lazy and incompetent MC, the chance to reconnect with what was in the flyer was no longer there for the speaker. As you can imagine, the person in the MC role can be difficult to handle for the speaker. They can choose to ignore everything you wrote and then give their own ad hoc version. Usually this is laced full of distortions, errors, exaggerations, serious gaps and miscommunication. Some MCs have pretty big egos too. They think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from you as the speaker. What actually comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement to you, because you know what they were supposed to say. It is seriously late by then though and no repairs are possible. For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points. Completely deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable or unsatisfactory. You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience. When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want to highlight about your glorious career thus far. I would also not rush into your background immediately following on from the MC. We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway. The start of the talk has only one purpose. That is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience from secretly reaching for their phone, to escape from you, to the irresistible charms and siren calls of the internet. Take the first few seconds of your talk very, very seriously. Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience. Only after that introduce yourself, rather than the other way around. Starting with your history is too passe, too expected. It doesn’t get any excitement going. When you get to your self-introduction, rather than reading your resume, look for opportunities to tell a brief story that brings some highlights to the attention of the listeners. This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are. This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed. We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you. Make it positive rather than negative. In other words, set yourself up for success. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you suffered and eventually learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light. This is what you want people to associate you with – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning. Don’t...
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    12 mins
  • Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests

    Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests
    Jan 5 2025
    Suddenly you hear your name being called upon and you are being requested to make a few remarks. Uh oh. No preparation, no warning and no escape. What do you do? Extemporaneous speaking is one of the most difficult tasks for a presenter. It could be during an internal meeting, a session with the big bosses in attendance or at a public venue. One moment you are nice and comfy, sitting there in your chair, taking a mild interest in the proceedings going on around you and next you are the main event. Usually the time between your name being called and you actually being handed the microphone can be counted in milliseconds. By the time you have heaved yourself out of your chair, your brain has well and truly started to panic. A mental whiteout is probably fully underway and your face is going red, because of all the blood pressure of the moment. Here are a couple of things we can do in this situation. Firstly, take a realistic look at the task at hand. The length of your talk will not be expected to be long. If you are a seasoned speaker, you could get up and wax lyrical for an hour without a problem. For everyone else, we are talking two to three minutes. Now two to three minutes seems rather short, except when you are suddenly thrust in front of a sea of expectant eyes of an audience. Once upon a time, I completely forgot my next sentence and discovered the pain of prolonged time. I was asked to give a brief talk and chose to speak in Mandarin to a crowd of around a thousand people, when I was Consul General in Osaka. It was a special event for the departing Chinese Consul General Li, who was heading to New York. Actually, I was going okay but I paused to allow some applause to die down – this turned out to be a major error on my part. I found when you suddenly go blank, a single microphone stand doesn’t provide much cover, up on a very big stage, with all the lights on you and everyone staring at you. That 30 seconds or so of silence, where I was totally lost and unable to recall what came next, seemed like a lifetime. So I know that two to three minutes can appear really daunting when suddenly called upon to speak. Begin by thanking whoever unceremoniously dragged you up the podium for the chance to say a few words. Try and smile at them, through gritted teeth if you have to. You have to say something, so take the occasion and put your comments into some form of context. You can use the concept of time as your ally. For example, this is where we were, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future. This past, present, future construct will work for just about any occasion and any subject. That is the type of ready to go format you need to be able to call upon when you don’t have much preparation time up your sleeve. Another good construct is macro and micro. Talk about the big picture issues related to the occasion, then talk about some of the micro issues. This is useful for putting the event into a frame you can speak about easily. There is always a big and small picture related to any topic. Again, this construct travels easily across occasions and events. We can use the weather, the location, the season or the time of the day as a theme. We can put this event into any of those contexts rather easily. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a long presentation. We can talk about people that everyone would know, who are related to the event. They might be present or absent. We can make a few positive remarks about our host. Then we can thank everyone for their attention, wish them our best and get off the stage. Let me give you a real life example. I was at an event for Ikebana International, sitting there calmly minding my own business, when I heard the speaker suddenly call me up to the stage to say a few words. I had the time from standing up to walk to the podium to compose myself about what on earth I would say. At the extreme outside that time gap was probably 10 seconds. I was going to need to speak in Japanese, so that just added another level of excitement to the challenge. It had been raining that day, so I miraculously dreamed up a water related analogy. I began by thanking the host for allowing me to say a few words, although I secretly I wasn’t so happy about being put on the spot. I mentioned that the stems of the Australian cut flowers that were being exhibited that day, contained water and soil from Australia, as they had just arrived that morning by air. I said that as a result here in Japan we had a little bit of Australia present and each of these flowers were like a floral ambassador linking the two countries together. I then wished everyone all the best for the event and got out of the firing line pronto. Probably not an award winning talk, but good enough for that occasion, with that amount of notice. And that is the point. You need to be able to say something ...
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    14 mins

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