The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Focus is under constant attack.  The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor.  Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable.  That is until you go back 5 years and look at all…

Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale?  This…

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has…

For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted…

Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore.  Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other th…

Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications.  Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buye…

 Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work.  We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it.  Bu…

When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored.  There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with po…

We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often…

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience.  What makes the difference?  The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person i…

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media.  It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states.  Most of these representatio…

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets.  In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client’s best interests.  We know we should l…

It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organization, to the client or to a larger audience.  The energy often quickly drops away, the voice just fades right out and there i…

Japan is a big small place.  It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area.  We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas li…

In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something…

 The Question and Answer component of talks are a fixture that we don’t normally analyse for structure possibilities. Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a hearteni…

During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985…

We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc.  We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer.  Next, they want to negotiate th…

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

Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies.  The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 J…