The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

We have been requested to give a talk, so where should we start?  Should we jump straight into pulling together all the slides for the presentation?  Absolutely not.  We need to prepare this talk so …

We all want to go to heaven, but none of us want to die.  We all want change, but we don’t want to change.  These are some of the typical contradictions we find in human society. Another one concerns…

 Sales is a difficult world, but there are certain environments which lend themselves more toward making salespeople successful. If we are allowed to flourish, the chances are high that we will maxim…

When you are under the spotlight in business you have to shine.  Yet, so often, we see people catapulted to the top as an award winner and they do a dreadful job with their acceptance speech.  You re…

Honey works better than vinegar in attracting people and their cooperation.  We know that, so why do we forget this at work.  We are short with people and too much occupied with our immense status an…

Unrequested contacts are frowned upon in Japan.  Direct mail goes straight in the bin. Emails from unknowns are deleted. Incoming phone calls are neglected and never called back.  This is grossly unf…

We live in a micro attention span world.  We are also becoming more and more self centered around what we want and why we need to have it right now.  A lot of the older courtesies and societal manner…

Cooperation is a key request within organisations.  Within small teams it tends to work well but it gets more challenging when you are trying to get other sections or divisions to cooperate with you.…

Tricky negotiators are losers.  They can only survive in a one shot business, because people won’t want to deal with them again.  Most of us in business are looking for lifetime, continuous, consiste…

 I absolutely hated the prospect of public speaking. In fact, I was a whimp and ran away from every chance I had to speak in public.  Careers are funny things, because at some stage you get to a poin…

The classic brutalist image of a departure from the firm is from the finance industry. The departee is handed a garbage bag to collect their chattels and are unceremoniously stripped of their entry b…

We rarely meet super pro negotiators in business.  Often the other side are just like us, rank amateurs.   Because we are just turning up to negotiate, we are often at a disadvantage because we don’t…

When we represent our organization in a public venue delivering a talk there are two brands on display.  Our companies brand, because everyone will make a judgment about the entire organisation based…

What are you like on creating first impressions with people you meet for the first time? We are all aware that establishing “know, like and trust” relationships with clients are three key ingredients…

We are only down to a few seconds today, when we start a talk before the audience decides their phones are more interesting than we are and they escape from us to the internet and social media.  We n…

Middle Managers are going to be the leadership group most directly interacting with the younger generation of employees.  We are on the cusp of entering the first ever free agent era of workers in Ja…

Customer service is a crowded field, with so many consumer products and services duking it out for survival.  How do you stay in operation and how do you sustain that over hundreds of years?  The thi…

It is a fine line we have to tread.  We want to be supplying data etc as evidence to support what we are saying.  However, there is the danger that the data overwhelms the point we are trying to make…

Maya Angelou noted, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.  Quite true isn’t it but recognizing so…

The Buyer is God not King in Japan and that difference is huge here.  There are so many cases of buyers treating sellers like dirt. The top prize has to go to the pharma industry dealing with haughty…