The Presentations Japan Series

Why rehearsal, timing, and delivery shape your reputation as a professional speaker in Japan and beyond

Why is timing so critical in business presentations?

The single biggest mistake in presentati…

 Why Japanese Leaders Struggle with Global Executive Presence — and How to Overcome the Barriers

What does “executive presence” really mean for Japanese leaders?

For global business audiences, exec…

I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age.  I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the chur…

Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend.  I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation l…

We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers.  We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk.  We automatically revert to the brain when w…

Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about.  The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they ma…

Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment.  These types of interviews come up relatively rarely i…

One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates.  Being unable to convince others to follow yo…

What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong

Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders.  I know this because the same requests keep coming up.  This is across industries and companies and i…

Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other.  We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line s…

Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple.  You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk.  I don’t know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but t…

Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells.  We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people.  Over time we have learnt how to…

English versus mathematics?  Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University.  Science is logical, knowable, understandable.  Presenting seems to have little in t…

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings.  Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss…

“That has to come out”.  “Why?”.  “It might offend women in the audience”.  “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”.  And so it went on.  This was my first bruising encounter w…

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pic…

This is horrible.  Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking?  I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it.  T…

It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain.  As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with…

When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters.  Today, we are…

The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their st…