The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Selling dull stuff is, well, dull.  We are supposed to be enthused about our widget but what if it doesn’t generate all that much enthusiasm in us? 

Industrial products are rarely sexy.  They tend …

Speakers are under assault.  Mobile phones tempt audiences to escape us to the internet and before you now it we have lost our audience to our message.  Putting people to sleep by the way we deliver …

As leaders in Japan, one of our biggest fears is ignorance.  We may come up with a genius idea that is actually rubbish.  The age, stage and power hierarchy here ensures no one wants to stand out by …

The sales process is a process with different phases and stages.  The skilled salesperson knows how to navigate their way through these phases in the conversation with the buyer.

We have a defined …

There are so many competitors for our audience’s attention today.  The last thing we need are “own goals” by letting the slide deck or the video steal our thunder.  We must be the dominator on stage …

We cannot stop remembering the past.  We cannot stop thinking about the future.  We learn from the past, good and bad and we prepare for the future, before it arrives.  These are survival mechanisms …

We often see presenters elevated up on stage or positioned at the front of the room, flanked by or under a screen, and protected from the audience by a rostrum.  In Japan standing above your seated a…

Change happens slowly in Japan.  Getting more women into leadership positions requires a lot of other moving parts to kick in.  One of them is changing the mindset of male line managers regarding who…

 We rush about chasing deals.  We nail one down and race off hunting for the next one.  Sometimes we need to switch from hunter to farmer and see if there is more to that first deal. We need to keep …

If we don’t grab their attention and interest, then our message is lost to them as they head off to the internet. 

“The good is the enemy of the great” is a clever saying and very true.  In present…

Japan has a very efficient education system around the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.  There was an effort to bridge the creativity gap with other countries but that was abandoned.  Where…

We usually think in terms of cultural differences with the West, when we are dealing with this unique country, Japan.  In fact, personality style differences of the buyer are much more important in b…

There are many things which impact an entrepreneurs success. 

Usually, when we think about how to succeed in our own business, we favour things like sufficient cash flow and capital.  This is absol…

Understanding the basics of Japanese business requires we have to know about nemawashi and what it means for us.  

Nemawashi is a very important word in Japanese.  It is made up of two words “ne” whi…

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting.  Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my slide deck for my key note presentation?  What…

The playbook on how to deal with difficult people wasn’t anywhere in sight throughout our entire schooling.  When we went to work this playbook was also missing from the induction training and from e…

Emperors and fishmongers.  The opposite end of the social spectrum, but in Japan, I discovered the levels of formality in meetings was unnervingly similar. 

Formality in Japan is linked very closely …

Storytelling by the speaker combined with audience participation is a winner.  We shouldn’t go crazy and over do it of course, but we definitely should use this technique.

Whenever I am in the USA,…

The classic half-time locker room Churchillian oratory from the coach, whipping the team into a frenzy for the coming onslaught is now gathering dust in Hollywood’s archives.  Today’s most successful…

All of the sales text books tell us, use case studies with clients who have been successful, to sell the next client.  Case studies are great for gaining credibility with potential cients, so it all …