The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Life is busy, busy today.  Communications has sped up business to an extent unthinkable even ten years ago.  Every company is a publisher now, due to social media’s pervasiveness.  Content marketing …

Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence.  Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions.  Culturally the thinking is …

Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctu…

The hero’s journey is for the very, very few.  I did it my way, I slaved away in a garret and got to the top, I realised the American dream – all good stuff, but an illusion for most.  The reality is…

Normally, as the seller, we are getting told “no” in sales, rather than the other way around.  When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things.  They start telli…

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important.  We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine l…

We are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan.  Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdo…

What are the chances of getting a “no” to your offer in sales?  Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get. Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople …

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time.  It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees.  After lunch, you mi…

All interfaces with the customer are designed by people.  It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in …

The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and lon…

Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers.  They bring focus to key points we want to get across.  They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged.  They also have danger with…

We love acronyms!  Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes.  They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is…

Projects are too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly.  We usually gather the team together and then dive strai…

Zen study is a way to strip out all of the non-essentials in life.  The noise, the distraction, the things that are not so important.  People sit around concentrating on their breath cycle or one wor…

Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them.  It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it…

Great service is so fleeting and  illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone.  One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is s…

I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses.  Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate.

 Stepping on to the floor

Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss.  They won’t tell you their name, they do…

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  O…