The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, Japan

We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested. The snag in all of this though is employees don't want that. They want the boss to be more interested in them, their career and their family. The feeling of being valued by the boss has been found to be an important trigger to create strong engagement in staff. Driver bosses rarely pull that trigger. They believe you need to “harden up baby”, do it yourself “like I did”. They wonder why we need to mollycoddle this lot. In fact they don't know how to snuggle up to staff and get to know them, because they never experienced that from their own bosses, and they are not built that way. They grew up independent and self-reliant. They are driven to achieve and have a take no prisoners approach to business. They are survival of the fittest advocates. Consequently, they are not much for small talk. They are permanently time pressed, so everything has to be driving toward an outcome, or it is a waste of their valuable time. How do you snuggle up to employees anyway? Bosses need to engage with their staff by using the “innerview” to deepen their understanding of who the person is who works for them, what are their motivations and interests. The sceptics may be thinking “brilliant”. Now they can interrogate their staff, find and start pressing their hot buttons, to get more production out of them having found some keys to staff motivation. This is not what we are talking about. Staff can spot this very quickly. They won't be interested in being manipulated by their bosses for higher productivity gains.  The effort is to get to know the team better, so that as the boss you can help them to succeed in their work by aligning their goals, interests and motivations with those of the organization. The classic win/win. Getting to know staff starts with asking basic factual questions. Where did they grow up, where did they go to school, what did they major in. Where have they worked in the past, what are their hobbies, how many in their family etc. To go deeper we need to ask causative questions. The “why” of their choices. Why did they pick that field of study, why that school, why this company, why that hobby, etc.  Then we get to values-based questions. Getting to know how they tick. If you had your life over again would you do things differently and if so , what would you do? What were some turning points in your life? What have been some of the work and non-work related things you have done that have made you feel proud? If you were giving advice to a person entering the workforce what would that be? These questions have to be asked in a relaxed manner, not spewed out like machine gun fire. This is getting to know someone better in order to better be able to appreciate them as a person. It is not a drill in shaking them down for private information, which can be used later to exploit them. Conversations like this, done correctly, invite massive mutual understanding. The end result is better communication and shared values. A uniting of mutual interests toward achieving goals together. So all of you driver bosses out there, this is how to get cuddly with the team. First sort out your objective and make sure it is reflecting the real interests of the staff.   Drop that manipulation thing. Then make the time available to have a deep one on one conversation with another human being who also exists on this planet just like you. Believe me, good things will flow from this.

 Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years.  What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing?  Those who don't study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.  Sounds reasonable doesn't it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time.  The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures. Do you have a good record keeping system?  When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the Australian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Nagoya.  As far as the locals were concerned, I was the Australian Ambassador to the Chubu Region.  I am sure the parade of the various Ambassadors in the Tokyo Embassy never saw it that way, but that is how the locals viewed my vice-regal presence.  One consequence was you were regularly asked to give long speeches.  I say long because a one hour speech would be a dawdle, compared to the two hour monstrosities you were expected to fill. I started writing down the speech number, the title, who it was for, what language was I speaking and how long was the speech.  I did this because Japan loves the devil they know and you would be asked back to speak again and it is embarrassing if you don't recall the first talk.  I am now over 560 speeches on my list.  Without knowing it I was compiling a body of  work as a speaker.  The list noted the topics I covered, which was a useful reservoir of things I could speak about if asked to venture forth a topic for the nominated speaking spot. I would often use visuals.  When I started we were back in the dark ages and were using overhead projectors (OHPs) and breakthrough innovations like colour OHPs instead of just black and white images.  For photographs, we used a slide carousel and a slide projector.  At some point we moved to powerpoint and life got a whole lot easier, when it came to preparing presentations.  Somewhere I probably still have those OHP presentations stored away somewhere, except today you would struggle to find an overhead projector to show them with.  We can much more easily store our presentation materials today, so there is no excuse about not doing that. I keep my presentations in digital files stored by the year in which they were delivered.  This is very handy because you can go back and see what you covered when you gave that talk.  Some of the images may be plundered for a current presentation, if they are relevant, so it is a nice resource to draw on.  You can also see how much you have grown in sophistication as a presenter, by looking at the quality of what you have been presenting.  This is a step we shouldn't miss because we are often so caught up in our everyday, we lose sense of the time progression in our presenter lives. A more difficult task is to grab the points that are additional to the slides.  These may be kept as notes on the print out of the slide deck or in a notes format for the talk.  If I have notes, which these days is pretty rare, then they will be very brief.  They are flags for me to expand upon when I am delivering my talk.  More frequently I will print out two or four slides per page and then write on those pages.  I will note some key points I want to make when we get to that slide.  If I am not using slides then the notes format plays the same prompt role.   Things occur to me during a talk, which were not planned.  Maybe I got a light bulb type of idea or a question exposed an answer and brought some additional information to the forefront.  One thing I strongly recommend is immediately after the speech, carve out thirty minutes for quiet reflection on the talk and think about what things you would change in order to make it better next time.  The tendency is to rush back to work, which usually means either meetings or catching up on email.  They can wait.  Don't schedule back to back activities after the talk – give yourself a little time to think. What I find hard to do is to store the notes hand written on the pages and the notes on the ideas which occurred to me after the talk.  Paper tends to get lost and you throw it out in a bug of spring cleaning and lose it.  Either take photos of the notes on your phone or scan the pages and then file them together with the electronic slide deck in the file for that year of talks.  This way you never lose the inspiration and record of your thinking about this topic. Time will pass.  You will deliver talks, will get ideas both before and after.  Capture them and learn from what went well and how you can improve on it for next time.  You need a system and if you don't have one today,  then now is a good time to think about creating one.

Here is an important mantra: We don't want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder.  Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before.  Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service.  Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service.  We have to be really clear about what is the customer's perception of good customer service.  This is a totally subjective idea on the part of the customer, but that doesn't mean we can't have influence on that perception.   Here is a quick audit on your understanding of the customer. How well do you know the customer's perception of high quality customer service?  When was the last time you asked about how well you were doing with serving that customer? Are you assuming that because there are no claims, that the customer is fully satisfied?  Do you have a clear idea of the level of service your competitor is providing in terms of customer service?   The building of a strong fan base amongst your clients is a key step to becoming more successful.  We all know the acquisition cost of finding a new customer is many times more expensive than deepening the scope of the relationship with an existing customer. That is fine but we need to also expand our numbers of customers. We always need more good customers, but how can we create new fans?  How do we do that when there are so many rivals?  Here are four approaches to consider.   Have broad product knowledge Whenever we ask a salesperson a question and they cannot answer it immediately, we doubt their value to us.  Often however, we salespeople can become concentrated on just a few products and lose touch with the broader perspective.  We need to keep studying our total product line-up, so that we have broad knowledge to show we are professionals in our business.  Prove that we can be trusted to serve the customer.  So ask yourself, how well do you know your own product line-up?   Have an extreme desire to help So many times, as customers, we are told “no” by salespeople. Are we ever happy about that response? Buyers are looking for salespeople who they feel are really motivated to serve.  The way to prove that is to show your strong desire to serve at every customer face to face meeting, on every phone call and in every response.  Great in theory but are you really doing that now?   Have a sincere interest in the customer's situation We have targets to achieve, pressure to perform and so often we can become totally focused on our own situation.  By the way, here is a newsflash - the client only cares about their own situation and how dedicated you are to helping them.  Are you really sincere about helping the customer or are you focused on yourself, your numbers, your deadlines?  Don't be in any doubt - customers can feel the difference.   Understand the customer's expectations Customer expectations change, but often salespeople are not changing with them. Business moves and what was enough some months ago, may not be suitable enough now.  We have to really monitor the customer's situation to see what has changed.  That means we have to keep asking them about their expectations of service from us.  Are we serving them in the way they want to be served.  Most salespeople never want to ask this type of question because they are scared of the answer.  We have to be brave and ask and if we do, we will be delivering exactly the type of service the customer wants and expects.  When we do that, we differentiate ourselves from our competitors   So what percentage of your customers would you count as your loyal fans?  What are you currently doing to drive that percentage score much higher?  Customers will become someone's loyal fan.  We have to make sure that is us and not our competitor. Assume that the customer's expectations and perceptions of what they consider outstanding service will keep changing.  We have to keep up with the change but are we doing it?

The New Year's resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline.  Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat.  The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible.  We learn as we go along and we add experience from year to year to hopefully make life easier. So as a presenter what would be possible? There are around 4.4 million podcasts around the world.  Blogs are in the billions now, video content is going crazy, live streaming is rampant.  Every single which way, we are under assault from competitor content marketing on steroids.  In addition, there is all of the advertising content coming at us through every medium.  Will it diminish?  No.  What does it mean for us in business? Personal reputation will be built through our efforts to cut through all of the clatter competing with us.  People are consuming information on small screens and are deluged with competing content.  The experience is transitory, because the next deluge is coming down the pike.  How do we linger long in people's memories?  Well we don't.  Even the few who see our content soon move on.  In offices, people sitting next to each other send emails rather than talk.  Phone calls put a dread fear into those younger colleagues entering the workplace.  The anonymity of the texting facility is preferred to human contact.  We are becoming increasingly impersonal, as we are fixated with our internet connected devices. In business though we need the human touch.  We want to do business with people we can judge are a safe option as a business partner.  We can check out their social media to get a sense of what they are about.  We can watch their videos to get a better idea of who they are and what they know.  This is all still rather remote and at arms length.  We don't do business that way.  We want to look them in the eye, to read their body language, to gauge their voice tone, to judge their intelligence through their mastery of the spoken word.  AI can write your posts for you, but when presenting on stage it is just you baby and you had better have the goods.  We want to see what we are getting. To get cut through, we need to be standing in front of as many audiences as possible.  Yes, we can attend networking events as a participant and we should, but we should be striving to do better than that.  We should be hogging the limelight, a titan astride the stage, commanding attention and delivering powerful messages.  That means seeking every opportunity to speak we can possibly manufacture, being proactive in promoting ourselves, unabashed about pushing our personal brand. Yes, there will be haters.  Two of my staff attended an American Chamber function recently and some helpful fellow attendee started laying into me about my social media profile and prolific posting behaviour.  They being very loyal staff were really upset about this, told me about it and were obviously frustrated regarding what to do about it.   I asked them a couple of clarifying questions.  Was the individual or their company a client? No.  Were they ever likely to become a client? No.  Did they have a personal brand of their own? No.  I didn't bother asking who it was, because they are obviously a know nothing, do nothing, become nothing nobody.  If you want to promote yourself you have to pop your head above the parapet.  Expect there will be someone who will want to kick it.  That doesn't mean we should self-censor ourselves, because some nobody is jealous about what we are doing.  Grasp on to the bigger picture here, have courage and go for it.  Those who get it will respect you, haters will hate you, no matter what you do. Public speaking is the last bastion for those who want to take their personal presence to the top.  We are being flooded by information around us, so we need to look for chances to break free from the crowd and establish ourselves as the expert in our field.  It means putting ourselves out there to be judged, but we are going to be judged anyway, so let's control our own destiny.  In 2025, resolve to do as much speaking as you possibly can and create as many opportunities as possible to promote your personal brand. Of course, AI can create a vast number of talks for competitors and can drown the market in content. What makes the difference though is our the sharing of our experiences and the personal stories we can tell.  The AI cannot match this personal authentic factor and we can escape the velocity of the vanilla content which AI produces so effortlessly.  This is how we can stand out and be memorable. When we read text, we can tell this was authored by AI. Audiences will soon start to recognise speech content created by AI and they will immediately discount it and the person delivering it.  In a way, it is a golden chance to standout amongst the AI Lilliputians.  Don't wait for people to clamour on your door to give talks.  Get out there and seek those opportunities for yourself and keep polishing your abilities

351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking “this has nothing to do with my leadership”, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn't talk to them enough because they are too busy, don't have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers into a few. The other has been the democratization of information access. Bosses have been struggling to keep up. When we had more layers in our company structures, leaders matured like a fine wine. They rose up the ladder in small increments, over an extended period of time and were groomed for responsibility. There were assistants aplenty to do mundane, time consuming tasks. The striping out of the layers, for the sake of cost cutting and “efficiencies”, has thrown this world off its axis. The fewer layers means the jumps are larger, the responsibilities greater and no assistants. Boss busyness has resulted in less subordinate coaching and delegation getting done. Explanations have been replaced with directives – “do this, do that”. Bosses don't delegate much anymore, because they are time poor. They don't have the bandwidth to explain, so they say to themselves, “it will be quicker if I do it myself”. Does this scenario sound familiar at all? The internet has made information instantly available and free. Boss monopolisation of information is not as easy or replicable as in the past. The amount of information emerging everyday has become a massive flood tide against which resistance is useless. Bosses cannot be in command of its entirety, so they have to rely on others much more than before. They need their subordinate's help, but the sting in the tail is that they are not doing enough about accessing that help. Subordinates have good information, get ideas, are closer to the market, collect the most up to date experience and produce insights. Harassed time poor bosses have no time to seek out these ideas and bring these insights out into the open. They don't create the time required to coach. They do delegation, but in a way guaranteed to fail, because they won't invest the time to sell the delegation. The consequence is that subordinates hesitate to engage with their boss, because they see how distracted and frantic they are already. When they do talk to the boss, it is all formulistic around reporting on progress on the various projects being worked on. Bosses don't bother to enquire about the other key things going on in their subordinates lives. They fail to seek ideas and innovations because they are already preoccupied with their own work. They hover between distracted and selective listening. On a slow day, they might stray into the zone of attentive listening, but that would be a rarity in a year long period. In fact, bosses tend to excel at pretending to be listening, because they are brilliant at multi-tasking. They are mentally fixated on something else, while they are talking to their subordinates on a completely different topic. Does this ring a bell? They are listening for key items which will be of interest to them and they are tossing out everything else. The subordinate doesn't feel they are actually being listened to at all. They don't feel it is attentive listening, let alone empathetic listening. They draw the conclusion that their actual perceived worth and value to the boss is pretty low. They get discouraged and soon just stop inputting ideas into the system. If you have not been hit up with an idea from one of your subordinates in the last month, take a moment and reflect on exactly when was the last time that happened? The chances are it has been a long time between drinks. The reason is probably that you are not really engaging with the team and making sure they feel they are being listened to. They need to know that their ideas have value, that you are recognising their contribution. They want to see their ideas being put into application. Are you doing this? Are you really listening?

350 The Rule Of Three   Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year's revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn't.  Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year?  That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”.  Maybe that was it, but it was hard to tell.  There were three other things which were gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which happened the previous week.  Sales is an emotional roller coaster, we all know that.  Well knowing that and being able to deal with the emotional downers is another thing altogether.  I am a positive, upbeat person, for whom the glass is always half full.  My glass got severely drained and it is still bugging me. I had a pitch for a client's business to help their sale's effort.  Actually they said they wanted a “transformation programme”. I had met the CEO previously and had understood what he was after.  I came back to him with a comprehensive proposal.  In the interim, a new HR person was recruited and I was informed were now going to have a five entrant beauty parade.  They had various needs.  They wanted transformation for their senior leaders, middle level sales managers and also wanted an internal trainer-the-trainer functionality, because the size of their sale force. That cost would preclude an externally delivered vendor solution. I gave them that transformation formula.  I even brought all of the training materials to the pitch, so they could see the professionalism we offer.  I went through in detail what each group would need if they wanted to transform the business. That week the HR guy wrote to me and said we didn't get the business.  I had no idea why, but I did know I wouldn't find out the real reason by talking to the HR guy.  All I would get would be vagary.  I needed to seek out the CEO directly and get some feedback.  We rarely ever lose pitches, so I was a bit perplexed.  To be honest, my ego was bruised, hurting and I found this news depressing.  The point here is that although I know intellectually, that sales is an emotional rollercoaster, it doesn't make much difference in the moment when you don't get the deal. The second piece of bad news was a delay in commencing a project.  I had done a similar project for their company and they asked me to come back and do another one.  That last project was a real nightmare.  I was dealing with a young staff member who proved to be very demanding and sucked up a lot more of my time than was expected.  Frequent changes were de rigueur and often without much actual requirement, except for whim.  Frankly, I was a bit gun shy to go again. However, it was a different member of staff this time, again quite young, but I agreed.  Deja vu.  Very demanding, very picky, but despite recurring nightmares about last time, I decided I wouldn't throw in the towel and would tough it out.  What doesn't kill me makes me stronger type of thing. Then I got the email telling me to put the project on hold.  I am guessing they were shopping the project around and were putting me on ice.  I was wondering what was the issue?  Was this a generational thing?  Both individuals were quite young in business. You have to have some degree of experience, to have perspective and to know how to judge what you are looking at.  Is this why there is a gap between what we were both looking at?  Another deeper thought occurred to me. Am I secretly blowing it up, because I actually I don't want to do it?  I know how much time it required last time and it looked like we were going down the exact same path again?  I was wondering, what was my psychology here? Was I trying to get out of doing it?  Or was I too old and inflexible to deal with these demanding young whippersnapper pups?  That was a depressing prospect. The third one was a case of sports negotiating.  This is an ego trip for buyers, who like to see who is the sheik of the souk, the biggest wheeler and dealer, the cleverest negotiator, the bargain hunter extraordinaire.  They like to play a little game of “beat down the supplier” to show how tough they are. Okay, you do run into that from time to time, but on this occasion it came from an unexpected source.  You meet people in business who are attractive, charismatic, your type of person. This buyer was like that.  We have a lot in common and I like the cut of his jib. He asked for some training previously and I sent him my proposal.  He came back with a counter offer that was at a steep discount.  I like the guy and reluctantly agreed, because it was the first business with his company.  I thought , “well once he experiences our quality, he will pay the right price”. My big mistake right there. So I delivered the training and then found out that the next round will be done by someone I knew who used to work with us as a contract trainer. This guy has a full time job in HR and does some training on the side.  That was another red flag.  There is no comparison in the quality of what is being delivered here, but I started to see where the client's negotiation pricing benchmark was coming from.  So he subsequently asked me for some one-on-one coaching for presentations.  I sent him my proposal and he came back with what he thought the price should be. The language he used in the email was the same as the last email and so another red flag appeared.  I asked myself, why is this guy nickel and diming me?  The quality of the training he got from me last time was at the top of the tree. So I felt his haggling was insulting and saying our quality wasn't appreciated.  I also thought we had a better relationship that that.  This time, I stood my ground, defended my quality, our brand.  I answered him that if he wanted the best, then this is the number.  As far as I am concerned, this time, there will be no discounting of even one yen. Subsequent silence on his part. So what do we take away from all of this.  Despite the many years we have all been in sales we need to prepare for cyclical depression.  I should have known that there is going to be an inevitable downer associated with the start of the new year.  I have to remind myself that my team will be feeling the same way, so I needed to work on boosting all of our emotions to move to positive ground. Just kicking off “as usual” in the new financial year won't cut it.  I needed to make an intervention. I told my team, “no” isn't “no”.  It is just “no” to this offer in this format, in this budget cycle, in this economic situation.  I needed to tell myself that too.  I need to separate my ego from the non-acceptance of our offers.  There may be a number of reasons why the pitches failed and I needed to find out what was the mismatch between what I thought they needed and what they actually chose.  I discovered my new found buddy was actually no buddy.  Where possible, I like to make my clients my friends.  I thought he would be in that category.  By the way, in his industry, his firm's fees are very stiff and they don't discount them at all.  What I realised was his value system substantially differed from mine.  He wants to “win” the negotiation.  I am focused on building partnerships that concentrate on the re-order, not the one off discounted deal.  We have a strong brand to defend and the way to do that is to draw a line in the sand on what you believe your value is worth.  So he was moved into the acquaintance basket. Not long after, he up and quit as President and suddenly moved to Saudi Arabia, so he eventually disappeared altogether. I still feel unhappy, but I do feel better about standing my ground.

 I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students.  The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment.  This was pretty grand affair.  The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School.  Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers.  It a perfect Japanese storm.  Japan loves uniforms and the organising body had that covered and Japan loves formality and there was plenty of that on display too.  There were some significant lessons on offer for presenters as well. One of the sponsoring countries had their Ambassador there to present a prize and give a speech.  Extolling the virtues of his country and its educational opportunities for these keen students of English is a natural fit.  What wasn't so natural was that he had to read his speech.  I have been a diplomat, yet I see this time and time again - Ambassadors who are poor public speakers.  Anyone in that position, for that type of occasion who has to read his speech, qualifies as a poor pubic speaker in my book. By contrast Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado gave a splendid speech, alternating between English and Japanese.  She wasn't reading it, the content was relevant and interesting.  When you are a member of the Imperial family there is tremendous expectation on you and she could have chosen the safe route and have read her speech.  Yet, she gave her remarks without notes and spoke freely.   It was so much more powerful and connected with her audience.   The toast was given by a senior Government official, who did so in excellent English and without any notes either.  The only one who couldn't give his speech without reading it, was the one native speaker involved.  Rather ironic I thought. Then we had the three finalists give their talks.  Of course they had memorised their speeches.  As Middle School students living in Japan it would be unlikely they would be able to do anything less.  A five minute speech is a long time to memorise a speech, but they all did it brilliantly.  If the Japanese education system does one thing well, it is rote memorisation.  The final speech was given by the winner and it was very surprising.  Also surprisingly, the three finalists were all boys, where normally this is an area of education where girls usually do better. The English pronunciation of the finalist was certainly not as good as the second and third place winners. You would think that would disqualify him for winning but it didn't for a number of very important reasons.  When he started speaking I was thinking that his pronunciation wasn't so good, so how did he manage to win?  What followed was a winning combination of factors. We can learn a lot from a fifteen year old Middle School student from the backblocks of Wakayama Prefecture. His theme was about him trying to improve his poor pronunciation which was congruent with who he was.  In other words he was being authentic and appropriate in the eyes of his audience and so he could connect with them.  The other boys told stories too but this boy included dialogue with his grandmother in his recounting of his story and this added that additional element of drawing us into the action.  When he spoke he did something more than the other contestants. He spoke with his whole being.  The other two finalists with better English pronunciation used their voices, some small gestures and some facial expressions in their talks.  The winner however was speaking with his whole body language lined up behind his words.  He was moving in a relaxed way that was congruent with his message.  He sounded more natural, even though it was a totally canned speech.  He wasn't the best English speaker in the contest, but he was the best communicator in English.  That difference is huge.  I found the same thing with my Japanese.  I started by worrying about linguistic perfection but discovered it didn't matter.  Even if my vocabulary was limited, my pronunciation unreliable and my grammar garbled, the audience came with me into my story, when I delivered it the right way. As adults, in business, we can decide to avoid reading our speeches at all costs.  Thinking about our audience when we craft our talk is critical.  In the delivery, we should be authentic.  That means we don't worry about occasionally mispronouncing words or stumbling over phrases.  We are focused in our delivery on bringing our total body language, our passion, to the subject.  We don't get hung up on perfection, because we are focused on communication.  If we do that, then we will be successful in getting our messages across.

The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them. Organisations seem to be stacked with politicians who are excellent at ingratiating themselves with the higher ups and climbing over the bodies of their rivals to get to the top. Their political nous seems to be in inverse proportion to their lack of real leadership ability. Given we have much flatter organisations today and the correspondent pressure to do more faster and better with less, the pressure on leaders is at an all time high. The super leader is bullet proof, never makes a mistake and sums up the situation perfectly. They are also a pain to work for. Followers don't deal well with perfection. This is mainly because it is fake, because no one is perfect. It is a leader charade, a marketing effort, a clever attempt to maintain their position power. We never feel close to people like that, because there is no way in for us to be close to them. They are always separated from us by their self important self-image. We cannot identify with them because while they project they are perfect, we are only too aware of our own failings. We don't like perfect people because they make us feel inadequate and uncomfortable. They seem nothing like us, so there is felt to be very little in common. The irony is that as leaders, the less perfect we try to project ourselves, the more effective we will be in winning over followers. Yes, absolutely, we have to be competent, but we don't have to be perfect. We have the have the goods but we don't have to be a pain. By admitting our foibles and failings, we provide a way in for our followers to identify with us. When your basic premise is “I am perfect”, then you have to invest a lot of energy in backing that claim up and maintaining the perfectly assembled facade. On the other hand, you can say I am imperfect, but I still bring plenty of value to my followers and the organisation. You are confident enough to say you are not Mr. or Ms. Perfect. People lacking in confidence often try to appear something they are not, because they are not confident to show others their weaknesses. I was exactly like that for a very long time. When I was younger, I thought I had to be the best, brightest, smartest, toughest, quickest and the hardest worker. I thought all of this was necessary, because I didn't know how to be vulnerable. I was raised in a typical Aussie macho environment in Brisbane, where men had a clearly defined role and weakness wasn't any part of it. How about your case? As you move through your career you meet leaders who don't make any claims about how great they are and their teams love them. They don't strut around trying to prove they are the best and they just get on with helping others succeed. They are comfortable within their own skin and having nothing to prove to anyone. They get the job done like a duck on water. Above the surface it looks like they are just gliding along, without any effort being made, while the legs are working away under the waterline. The previous Mayor of Yokohama Fumiko Hayashi was relating a story about her time as a manager in BMW. She was unafraid to appear less than perfect, to encourage the men working for her to help her achieve the firm's goals. She later became president of BMW, Tokyo Nissan Auto sales and the Daiei supermarket chain - all bastions of male management. She was able to project her vulnerability and yet succeed in a male dominated Japan business world. I don't think this had anything to do with the fact she was a woman. I can think of another example right now of another extremely successful Japanese woman, who just projects ice in the veins, vicious, steely, killer toughness. The out-machoing the men in the room way to the top. This domination approach is one way of doing it and I have worked for plenty of men like that. I never liked them, respected them or was motivated by them. I thought they were jerks. Hayashi san however was able to be vulnerable and get others to help her and this is the lesson we can all learn. By being able to be vulnerable, we establish a relationship with our team where they feel comfortable. They still respect our ability, experience, dedication, hard work and our focus on helping them to succeed. None of that goes away just because we don't go around projecting we are superman or superwoman. So let's be confident and vulnerable at the same time. If we do that, gathering followers will become easier and leading will become more enjoyable and successful.

  Poor customer service really irritates us.  When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the firm.  We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it.  We don't see the processes as separate.  In this Age of Distraction, people's time has become compressed.  They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much permanently.  We all seem to have less time than before, so we become cross if things from the internet don't load or load too slowly. If we have to wait we don't like it, regardless of what the circumstance.  We are perpetually impatient.  Here is a deadly breeding ground for customer dissatisfaction There are five elements usually driving customer unhappiness with us.   1. Process We need processes to run our organisations on a daily basis.  This includes how we communicate and align the features and value of the offering with the customer's expectations.  In constant drives for great efficiencies, we tend to mould the processes to suit the organisation's needs, in preference to the customers needs.  Japan is a classic in having staff run the business based on what is in the manual.  If a decision requires any flexibility, this is usually dismissed because the staff only do what the manual says.  As the customer, we often want things at the odds with the manual or we want something that diverges from what the manual says. Take a look at your own procedures.  Are there areas where you can allow the staff to exercise their own judgment?  Can you empower them to solve the customer's problem, regardless of what is in the manual. Our processes often become covered in barnacles over the years and from time to time we need to scrape them off and re-examine why we insist things can only be done in this way.   2. Roles Who does what in the organisation.  This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japanese staff, in my experience, want their accountabilities very precisely specified and preferably to be made as tiny as possible.  They are scared of making a mistake and being held accountable if things go wrong. They have learnt that the best way of doing that is to become as small a target as possible.  The usual role split works well, but what happens when people leave, are off sick or away on holiday?  This is when things go awry.  Covering absent colleagues requires flexibility and this is not a well developed muscle in Japan.  What usually happens is everything is held in abeyance until the responsible person turns up again.  Customers don't respect those timelines and they imagine that everyone working for the firm is responsible for the service rather than only the absent colleague. We need a strong culture of we pick up the fallen sword and go to battle to help our customer, if we are the only person around.  This is particularly the case with temp staff.  They are often answering phone calls or dealing with drop in visitors and they need to be trained on being flexible and fixing the customer issue.   3. Interpersonal Issues How customer service personnel get along with each other and other departments is key. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty.  Sales overselling and over promising customers drives the back office team crazy.  They have to fulfil the order and it is usually in a time frame that puts tons of pressure on the team.  This is how we get the break down of trust and animosity reigning inside the machine.  This leads to a lack of communication and delivery sequences can get derailed. When colleagues are angry, they tend not to answer the customer's phone call as sweetly as we might hope.  We need to be careful to balance out these contradictions and have protocols in place where we can minimise the damage. What are your protocols and does everyone know and adhere to them.  Now would be a good time to check up on that situation.   4. Direction How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is key.  This is the glue.  We need this when things are not going according to plan.  When we grant people the freedom to uphold all of these highfalutin words in the vision statement with their independent actions, then we introduce the needed flexibility to satisfy clients.  Are your people able to take these guiding statements issued from on high and then turn them into solutions for clients?   5. External Pressures The resources available to the customer service departments such as time and money become critical to solving customer issues.  How much control do we give to the people on the front line to solve problems for our customers?  Often we weight them down with rules, regulations and procedures, which make them inflexible.  Check how much freedom you have granted to your team to fix a problem for a client? You may find that during the last recession you wound that whole process in very tight and forgot to loosen it off, after times got better.   We need to get under the waterline and check for a build up of barnacles impeding our customer service provision.  Scrape them off wherever you find them and have a steady routine to always take a look and see what has built up over time.  Invariably you will find something that can be removed or streamlined, that the customer will appreciate.  Remember, if you can do this and your rivals can't or don't, that is a big advantage in the customer satisfaction stakes.  

Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team's performance.  Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter.  Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points.  Presenting should be no different.  Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speakers were recording themselves for later analysis?  I would assert that the answer would be either zero or very close to zero.  Why would that be?  High performance athletes are constantly using video to check on what they are doing.  Why don't high performance leaders, experts, executives, industry influencers, and assorted gurus do the same thing? These days the technology is very good.  A simple video camera and tripod investment is a minor affair.  The camera microphone itself at a certain distance is fine or you can add a shotgun microphone if needed.  You just set it up turn it on and forget about it until the end.  You may have to be careful with the arrangements such that no one in the audience will be in the shot and you need to tell everyone that is the case in order to remove privacy concerns.  Well if it is all this easy why aren't more speakers doing this?  The smarter ones are.  I often coach speakers before major presentations and we always use video.  I can tell them what they are doing that needs improvement, but there is nothing more powerful than having that information pointed out to you and seeing it at the same time.  If it is just you shooting the video yourself and there is no coach review possibility, there is still enough material on the video for you to make improvements in your presentation. How do you review the presentation?  Look at four possibilities for the next time.  What can you delete, add, reduce or amplify?  There may be habits you have that detract from the persuasion power of the message.  Perhaps you are mumbling or umming and ahing.  Confidence sells and to sound confident you must be clear and consistent in your delivery.  Look for tell taLe body language tics that have a negative connotation.  You might be swaying around in a distracting way that competes with what you are saying.  Or you maybe be fidgeting, or striding around the stage showing off to everyone how nervous you are.  All of these habits weaken your message with your audience. Are you engaging the audience with your eye contact?  My Japanese history professor at university would deliver every lecture staring at the very top of the back wall and never engage in any eye contact with the students.  Don't be like that.  Use every second of the presentation to lock eyes with members of your audience for about six seconds, one at a time and in random order.  Are you using congruent gestures during you explanation or no gestures or too many gestures or permanent gestures?  Gestures are there to be points of emphasis, so hold for a maximum of fifteen seconds and then turn them off. Video is also excellent for considering what you might have done, looking for things you could have added to the presentation.  Maybe there was a chance to use a prop or introduce a slide to support a point or call for more audience participation by getting them to raise their hands in response to a question.  I was giving a talk recently on “AI in the Workplace” and I showed two paintings labelled A and B and asked the audience which one was painted by AI.  They had to raise their hands to vote.  This was more interesting than just showing them a slide with a painting done by AI.  Roughly half of the audience went for either A or B.  In fact they were both done by A1 so it was a bit of ruse, but very effective to drive home the point I was making. If you cannot organise a video or if the hosts are not cooperative, then have someone you trust give you feedback.  Don't ask them a broad question such as “how was it?'.  We need to be more specific.  “Did my opening grab the attention of the audience?”,  “Were my main points clear and supported with credible evidence”, “Was I engaging my audience with good quality eye contact throughout?”,  etc.  Give them a checklist before you start so you can guide them in what to look for.  Unless they are a public speaking expert themselves, they won't know how to help you best. In a year, most people don't get that much opportunity to speak in public, so it very hard to get the right frequency to enable improvement.  If you could do the same presentation five times in a row, by the last one you would be on fire, but that hardly ever happens.  This is why the video or expert feedback becomes so useful.  You can review the presentation at your leisure and improve on your professional public speaking capabilities for the next outing

 Leadership is a swamp. Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment. With a constant army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as an officer, you saw a certain type of leadership being employed and the chances are that was why there were so many “command and control” leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. The Woodstock generation questioned what had been accepted logic and wanted a different boss-employee relationship, where those below had more input into the direction of the company. Technology breakthroughs and the internet made hard skill warriors the gurus of leadership. Steve Jobs abusing and belittling his engineers was accepted, because he was so prescient and smart. Technology has however also democratized the workplace. Thanks to search engines and now AI, the  boss is no longer the only one with access to key information. Being really smart and even mildly abusive isn't acceptable anymore. The boss-employee relationship has changed. It is going to keep changing too, especially here in Japan where there are 1.3 jobs for every person working. Recruiting and retaining people becomes a key boss skill. The degree of engagement of the team makes a big difference in maintaining existing customer loyalty and the needed brand building to attract new customers. Social media will kill any organisation providing sub-standard service, because the damage travels far, fast and wide. The role of the boss has changed, but have the bosses been able to keep up? Recent Dale Carnegie research on leaders found four blind spots, which were hindering leaders from fully engaging their teams. None of these were hard skill deficiencies. All four focused on people skills. Leaders must give their employees sincere praise and appreciation We just aren't doing it enough. With the stripping out of layers in organisations, leaders are doing much bigger jobs with fewer resources. Time is short and coaching has been replaced by barking out commands. Work must get done fast because there is so much more coming behind it. We are all hurtling along at a rapid clip. The boss can forget that the team are people, emotional beings, not consistent revenue producing machines. Interestingly, 76% of the research respondents said they would work harder if they received praise and appreciation from their boss. Take a reality check on yourself. How often to do you recognise your people and give them sincere praise? Leaders do well to admit when they are wrong The scramble up the greasy pole requires enormous self-belief and image building. Mistakes hinder rapid career climbs and have to be avoided. Often this is done by shifting the blame down to underlings. The credit for work well done, of course, flows up to the genius boss who hogs all the limelight. The team are not stupid. They see the selfishness and respond by being only partially engaged in their work. In 81% of the cases, the research found that bosses who can admit they made mistakes are more inspirational to their team members. Effective leaders truly listen, respect and value their employees' opinions Who knows the most? Often the boss assumes that is them, because they have been anointed “boss”. They have more experience, better insights and a greater awareness of where the big picture is taking the firm. So why listen to subordinate's mediocre and half baked ideas? Well, engaging people means helping them feel they are being listened to by their boss. Sadly, 51% of the survey respondents said their boss doesn't really listen to them. Ask yourself, am I really focusing 100% of my attention on what my team are telling me or am I mentally multi-tasking and thinking about other things at the same time, especially what I am goi g to say? Employees want leaders they can trust to be honest with themselves and others There are two elements to this – external and internal reliability. External reliability is the boss does what the boss says they will do. They “walk the talk”. In the survey, 70% said their boss couldn't be depended upon to be honest and trustworthy when dealing with others. That is a pretty shocking and damning result. The internal reliability focused on being consistent with your own core beliefs. Again, 70% said their boss fails in this regard – another total shocker! Obviously, bosses are not employing their full self-awareness about how they are being perceived. You get back the 360 degree survey and there is your blood everywhere and we can argue people have it wrong, but perception is reality. We need to pay more attention to each of these leadership blind spots if we want to engage our team members. Only engaged team members can deliver the highest levels of service to clients and that must be our aim. To achieve that, we have to take a cold hard look at ourselves and lift our game, no matter how painful that might prove.

Bad service is a brand killer. This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation.  It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish.  There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo.  It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants here can be so oblivious to Japanese standards of omotenashi.  Omotenashi is that sublime combination of anticipating and exceeding client's expectations, that has made Japanese service so famous.  I love Chinese cuisine and I enjoy the high quality standard of Chinese food in Japan.  They have the best, most expensive quality, very safe ingredients and really great Chinese chefs here. When I go to places in Tokyo like Akasaka Shisen Hanten in Hirakawacho the service is very, very good.  My observation is that is probably the case because the serving staff are Japanese or Chinese who have grown up here.  Whenever I go to some “all Chinese” affairs, with only Chinese staff, I find the service is disappointing.  I had this experience again recently in the Azabu Juban.  It was a first and last time to go to this particular restaurant. The food taste wasn't the issue, in fact some dishes were delicious.  It was the total disinterest on the part of the serving staff and their manager.  You don't feel any particular need to go back there, when there are a hundred other restaurants within a two-minute walk.  This makes no sense to me, because when I am Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan, the restaurant service is usually very good.  Obviously, the more expensive the restaurant, the better the service of course. So, there is nothing inherently missing in the service mentality and capability, that couldn't be applied in Japan.  Why then is it so lacking in omotenashi? I remember reading a purported Chinese saying that, “A man who cannot smile, should not open a shop”.  Obviously, some of the Chinese staff working in these establishments I am complaining about, have never heard of that piece of ancient Chinese wisdom.  Smiling, making you feel welcome, treating you well are a big fat zero in my experience.  The way of serving is very perfunctory, even rough, in some cases. Japanese style restaurant table service is generally very much more refined.  What is driving this difference and what does it mean for the rest of us in the service business? Perhaps some of the Chinese staff we are seeing serving in Japan are students. According to the media reports, many are actually working almost full time.  They are not professionally trained service staff, in the sense that this is their career.  Coming from certain parts of China and from different socio-economic backgrounds, they may have had no exposure to what good levels of service looks like.  I went to China for the first time in January 1976 and have been back a number of times over the years.  I studied Chinese language, history and politics at Griffith University's Modern Asian studies faculty. I like many aspects of Chinese culture and studied Tai Qi Quan for about ten years with my excellent teacher, Cordia Chu in Brisbane, before I moved back to Japan.  I haven't been back to China for a while, but I don't recall the service being particularly bad when I was there last.  Perhaps some of these local serving staff living here in Japan only ever eat Chinese food, so they are never exposed to how Japanese restaurants serve their clients. I find that hard to believe though. The thing that puzzles me most is that despite the fact these Chinese staff are working in Japan and are floating in a deep ocean of omotenashi, some don't seem to picking up any ideas on how to treat their clients.  Why would that be?  The managers are also Chinese, so they are responsible for leading their staff in the restaurants.  Are they oblivious to the service market in Japan and how it functions?  Are they just poor managers, who cannot place their operation in a broader context of local service standards.  Are they inflexible and incapable of understanding the lifetime value of a repeater client?  This is a very competitive restaurant scene here, has more Michelin starred restaurants than Paris, so you would expect that everyone, including some of these Chinese run establishments, would be doing everything they can to build a loyal, repeater client base. This challenges me to consider what we are doing in our own case, with our customer facing service.  If I am going to bag some of the Chinese restaurant's service here in Tokyo, then I had better consider our own standards at the same time. We are a gaishikei or foreign run establishment here.  I am not Japanese, but I am the boss.  Am I operating the company service provision in terms of what I am used to in Australia, my home country?  Am I doing an Australian version of what some of these Chinese restaurants are doing here in Tokyo in their service business?  Are we in fact, providing enough omotenashi service to our own clients? Could we do better in this regard? I find a lot of Japanese service very polite, but also rather impersonal and almost robotic sometimes.  Compared to the poorer versions of some of these Chinese restaurant service offerings however, I will take the Japanese polite, impersonal, robotic option every time. How can we see our service businesses in a different light?  How can we make sure we are not only providing omotenashi levels of service, but are going beyond that, to offer a more personalised experience? Maybe we need to audit what we are doing, to see if we are missing some vital areas for improvement. I really like Elios Locanda Italian restaurant in Hanzomon, because I am treated like one of the family.  This is the feeling transmitted through their Japanese staff. Elio himself, is not always there, all the time, but that authentic Italian family style service is there.  He is setting the service standard and the Japanese staff are following it.  I see this example and I think to myself, “it is possible to have a more personal level of service here, transmitted through your Japanese staff”.  My family and I have been regulars at Elios since we returned to Tokyo from Osaka in 2001. Talk about the repeater, life time value of the customer.  They have seen my son grow from a baby, to a young man in that time.  We are part of the family and this is the key - we were made to feel like that from Day One. How about your service provision standards?  Are you making your clients feel like part of the family?  What is your repeater rate?  How many people continue to buy from you, year after year? Are you tracking this?  Do you know what the average buying continuity rate is with your customers? When we see bad service, it is always a good reminder to make sure that what we are doing ourselves is at the required omotenashi level.  If you are not sure what I am talking about with this omotenashi thing, here is my recommendation. Go to a very upscale Japanese kaiseki restaurant preferably in Kyoto or a Toraiya traditional sweets shop and remind yourself what excellent service looks like. Then reflect on what you are offering in service terms. Break down your every touch point with your customers and clients and see if there isn't a lot more omotenashi that can be introduced in each case.  We can always learn from our own mistakes and from the mistakes of others when it comes to providing better service.  The point is to observe carefully, change quickly and commit to massive improvement.

Public speaking takes no prisoners. I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events.  I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago.  This is a daunting task.  Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation's training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying.  The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design.  Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty.  It comes up though.  The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year.  Are you ready to meet the challenge? There are some key components we must assemble.  There must be one clear and compelling message.  In a speech like this, we can't rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing.  They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused.  It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose.  We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say.  Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments.  Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people's emotions. A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic.  We need to hit the bullseye of what grabs people's hearts.  This is delivered through stories.  We take people on a journey of our construction.  We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think.  This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message. Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people's hearts and minds.  We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience.  Ideally, they can see these people in their mind's eye.  They might be people they have actually met or have heard of.  They may be historical events, legendary figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience.  In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event.  About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing coastal communities, of the chaos and destruction.  I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point. We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real.  We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author's creation, if the words create pictures.  We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place. We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive.  We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night.  This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant.  They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story. The delivery is where all of this comes together.  It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen.  There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect.  This is not some dubious, dodgy trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters.  No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through controlled exaggeration.  Our speaker in Phuket, toward the end of his talk, dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire  pushups on his fingertips. I don't know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength.  It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk.  There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity.  Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic.  The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message.  There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end. Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference.  Make it memorable and don't hesitate about going BIG.

 Being the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired. The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves of the stacks in the University library or other libraries in town. There was a physical card index system to help you find information, although browsing book spines was the fastest method of locating relevant tomes. Today, we have the entire holding of libraries digitized and available for discovery through advanced search tools. We have search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube and now AI platforms to help us find what we need to know. There are powerful publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok which floodlight information to us, using crowd sourcing of knowledge. We have email connecting us globally 24/7, we have video recordings, live streaming of events, podcasts, etc., all drowning us in information. My 23 year old son's generation have had to learn how to swim in the floodtide of data, how to analyse, synthesise, select only what is relevant, reliable and credible. Voice commands have replaced keyboards and AI is speeding up the process of access. Even the single, most powerful savant cannot withstand this data flood, cannot keep up with the publishing platforms, cannot do it all alone. Teamwork, the distribution of labour based on finite specialties, crowd sourcing of information and ideas is now a must. Most leaders were not raised in this maelstrom of confusion and over-reaching and struggle just to keep up. We were more or less able to have a superior grasp of subjects, better information than our followers, expert authority and greater specialisation to justify us being the boss. Today, we cannot know it all or do it all by ourselves. In any boss/follower situation, as you climb the ranks you get further and further away from the coalface and have to live the market reality absorbed by osmosis from your people. The flood of information makes that imperative even more pressing. The problem is are you and the other leaders in your organisation any good at coalescing the team's total power? Are those at the top able to develop people further to make them highly valuable experts supporting the growth of the enterprise? In Japan, the middle management echelon has been crushed by technology, too much data and the democratisation of data challenging their position power. Further, the speed of modern business is being propelled forward in asteroid catching slingshot mode, by instant communications and the widespread flattening of layers in organisations. In Japan, the gradual rise through the ranks, where you were coached by your bosses up the corporate rungs, until you got into a leadership position has been collapsed into only a few rungs today. Your erstwhile bosses had the time to develop their people. Today, be you expat or local, you as the boss in Japan, don't have any time to do that. You keep adding spinning plates to be kept in motion, as you flit from meeting to meeting, interspersed by deluge email, relentless social media and phone calls on your mobile at any hour of the day. Your “coaching time” has been compressed into barking orders and giving direction to the team. You have no time for doing much brainstorming, because you just have no time. Anyway, the brainstorming method you are using is almost 100% ineffective anyway, so it probably makes no difference. You may as well do a few more emails instead. Actually, it does make a difference though, compared to what needs to be done. The bosses can't do it all by themselves anymore. They don't have all the key data and insights. They are perilously time poor, distracted, stressed and busy, busy, busy. They need to have the support of the team to get all the work done and they need the team to be engaged to care about getting it all done. People quality is an issue and only going to get worse as Japan's demographic decline means anyone with a pulse will be hired. People who just turn up to work in Japan, waiting for their turn to rise up through the ranks, based on when they entered the company, who are scared of their own shadow and can't take risks are pretty much useless. These people by the way, are the majority of the workforce. So the boss needs to be able to engage the team. This means being a great communicator, who flags the WHY all the time and makes the smallest task or simplest job seem relevant in the big scheme of things. Leaders have to be able to motivate the team through involving them in decision-making, through getting their ideas out using effective brainstorming methods, through excellent coaching of talent to help them rise. Delegation is a powerful coaching tool hardly used for that purpose in Japan. It is corrupted by “seagull management” - the “fire orders, dump and flee” technique of the harassed boss in Japan. Because of this, it always underdelivers and underperforms. Excellent time management is a must, if bosses are to have the margin to develop their people. That activity requires good people skills and needs time.  It can't be short circuited or compressed. We have to know what is the motivator for each of our people, so we know how to align the talks and the work to be a best fit to help them advance in their careers The days of the singular, independent, warrior hero boss are dead in Japan. The new boss is sitting atop the amalgam of the talents of the team, orchestrating the teamwork, supporting the innovations, and inspiring greatness through the actual words being spoken into the ear of each single team member. Be honest, tell me, is this what you and the other leaders are doing down at your shop?  If not, then what are they doing and what should they be doing?  Time to take a cold hard look at your leader cohort and if there are gaps, then get them help to fix those deficiencies.

Sales is a nightmare. It is usually a solitary life.  You head off to meet customers all day.  Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can't do on-line.  Japan is a bit different.  Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client.  If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person.  This is a country of on-the-job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations, there is more of a tendency to send more than one person to the sales meeting.  Often, there is a need for a technical person or someone with highly specialised knowledge to attend the buyers' meeting.  This can present some issues if there is no plan for the meeting.  I was coaching a salesperson recently who related a horror story to me.  The person in question is relatively new to sales, so still finding their way.  A more experienced salesperson from a different division was joining the meeting.  The intention was to provide more than one solution for the buyer. Without any prior discussion, the accompanying salesperson offered 70% off the pricing in exchange for a volume purchase, in order to grow the relationship.  Hearing this from him I was so shocked.  I nearly blew my coffee out through my nose.  There are so many things wrong with this vignette.  These are both salespeople on a base and commission arrangement.  One salesperson is hacking into the commission of the other, for a product line-up they don't represent.  This is outrageous behaviour.  If you are in that sales meeting and your partner blurts out a combustible like that, you cannot reel it back in or reduce its toxic lethality.  It is stated, out on the wild now and you have to live with that statement having been uttered by your side. This was first meeting too, so the damage is even worse.  Now the client automatically discounts any rack rate or stated pricing by 70%, because that is what you have trained them to do.  When you are in a first meeting in Japan, it would be reasonably rare to even get into pricing.  The first meeting has some fixed requirements.  The first is to build the trust with the buyer.  They don't know you, so they are suspicious. They are not sitting across from you thinking, “oh goody, here is someone who can help our business to grow”. They are not sure if your word can be trusted, whether you are smart enough to deal with them or if they like you. These outcomes take a good chunk of time to achieve and doing so in one meeting is being overly confident. You also have to understand if there is any point in talking at all.  Do you have what they need?  In order to make that judgement, you must be asking them highly intelligent questions.  What are they doing now?  Where would they like to be?  If they know that, then why aren't they there already?  What will it mean for them personally if this goes well?  We have to be running a scanner over them to understand their needs and then match it up with our catalogue of solutions.  All of this takes time.  We usually only get an hour with the buyer in Japan, so we need to grab as much information and insight as we possibly can before we have to high tail it out of there.  Before we do so though, we must set the date and time for the follow-up meeting to present the solution.  Don't wait - do it right there and then or we may never get back into their busy, busy diary. Back at the lab we brew up the perfect solution and craft it into a killer proposal. Now we go back and present the solution. They may want us to email it to them, but with every fibre in our body we resist that option.  We never ever want to be sending a naked, unprotected proposal to the buyer.  It needs us right there alongside it, to underline the value attached to the pricing and deal with any questions or misunderstandings which may emerge.  We want to read their body language very carefully when they react to what we have suggested. We only talk price in the second meeting and we never start with a discount.  We offer the set price and this is the anchor that sets the terms of the discussion.  We may drop the price in exchange for a volume purchase, but by 70%?  That is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while in sales.  As it turns out, I know the guilty party in this case, so it is even more shocking. They should have had more common sense.  The problem is they state it and there is nothing you can do.  Common sense is not common.  The horse has bolted for our hero in this story, but the rest of us should all take careful note.  So don't expect that the people accompanying you to have common sense.  Now this is especially the case if they are selling a different line of product from you and they have no skin in the game concerning a heavily discounted sale of your offering.  Before the meeting, set the ground rules, just in case.  Pricing creates tension and some people cannot bear it. There will ensue a very uncomfortable silence but we want this. Our comrade however will feel they must say something to release the tension in the room because they cannot hack it.  Absolutely do not allow this to happen, because that tension is our bosom friend.  Say this up front: “when we get to my line-up explanation, I will be the one making the offer and that includes pricing.  When I state the price, absolutely do not speak.  The number will generate some considerable tension in the room.  Under no circumstances release that tension by adding a comment or a justification or anything else.  I need that tension to make the sale. Sit there and be silent as the tomb.  If you cannot do that, then don't come with me”. Fix the way you will both handle the components of the meeting before you get anywhere near a client.  Be very direct with what you want.  This is your livelihood derived from your commission we are talking about here. Don't let an uninterested party or some useful idiot helping the buyer's side, destroy your pricing arrangements.  Once they shoot their mouth off it is too late.  You have to get to them beforehand and nobble them.  If you do it this way you will sell more and do it more easily.

Japan doesn't love crazy. In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go crazy, go over the top”.  This is challenging in Japan. Normally, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in society.  Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained.  Unfortunately, this often carries over into our public presentations. Without realising it, we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, putting everyone to sleep.  Our body language is minimal and our gestures rather weak, even perfunctory.  The radical exercises we put everyone through are there to expand their range of possibilities as presenters. To do this, we really exaggerate the energy levels and scope.  Of course, in its raw, uncontrolled form, it is way too much for a professional presentation. As a specific training tool it is fine.  I am often asked though, how much is too much, when it comes to being more powerful as a presenter?  How much “over the top” is appropriate? I definitely think there is a place for going “over the top” in a business presentation.   The degree to which you push the envelope though is dependent on the subject, your message and the audience. There is no simple scale where the excessive bits are neatly marked in red warning lines for our calibration.  If you are giving your talk and you outraged by something, then expressing your outrage during your talk will be entirely congruent.  You may do that with a higher level of voice volume, hitting certain key words harder, combined with strong body language, a matching facial expression and bigger gestures backing up the message. You can't keep going at that “over the top” level though, because you will wear out your audience and its real impact begins to unwind pretty quickly.  Clinical, well planned bursts are more effective, because of the contrast between the storm and calm.  It is a bit like classical music with its crescendos and lulls. When presenting, our body language is very powerful and very expressive.  It can really jumpstart an idea.  We are firm devotees of this concept.  For example, in our morning meetings or chorei, we have a couple of set pieces.  Each day a different person leads the group.  We go through the Vision, Mission, Values, one of Dale Carnegie's principles, motivational quote, etc.  In our Mission Statement component we say, “By providing customised business solutions, based on the Dale Carnegie Principles,  we exceed our client's expectations”.   When the chorei leader says the word “exceed” everyone does their version of thrusting a pointed finger as high as possible, upward toward the sky.  At another point in the chorei we talk about our mantra, which is to “10 X our thoughts and our actions”.  We used to do this by thrusting our arms across our chests, opening up the fingers of both hands, so that we are expressing the symbol of an X shape and the number ten.  One of the team had the genius idea of going more over the top.  So now we stand with our feet well apart and push both our arms out and upward at 45 degrees, so that the effect is to create a cross symbol, in the same shape as the letter “X”.  It is a very dynamic movement and very powerful in communicating the idea behind it.  What has this got to do with presenting in public? The difficult part is to free ourselves from the limitations and constraints of normal daily conversation. Usually we are highly restrained by societal conditioning and so we need to let some pizzazz come into our presenting persona.  Our daily chorei gets us used to going over the top.  How can we change what we have been doing for so many years? Let's start small. When speaking in public, just hitting a key word very loudly or elongating its pronunciation is very dynamic. This pattern break will grab your audience's attention.  It helps us to break through all of the mental clutter and minutiae that is dominating their thoughts and preventing them from giving us their full attention. Always assume that when they enter the venue, their brains are already completely full and we have to create some space for our ideas and main points. When we combine a key word with a very big gesture, then the amplification of that message becomes very powerful.  I noticed this when I was presenting to an audience of five thousand people.  The venue was large, the seats at the back were far, far away. To the top tier guests, in the very back rows, I was as big as a peanut from that distance.  In this case, you have to use the whole stage, center, left and right sides and the stage apron. You have to employ very exaggerated gestures to overcome the tyranny of distance from your audience seated in the cheap seats at the back. Props are another area where some showmanship can work well.  In a speech in Japanese in Nagoya, I was making the point that Australia was very much focused on the Asian region.  I decided to reverse an 18th century Meiji era slogan for effect.  In the original, Japan was being encouraged to leave Asia and follow Europe.  It was always written “Datsu A Nyu O”.  I reversed it to “Datsu O Nyu A, meaning for Australia to stop following Europe and to follow Asia instead.  By itself, reversing the well known slogan was a powerful idea. It was a new construct for a Japanese audience to have such famous a Meiji era call to action, which they all studied at High School, reoriented to a completely new meaning.  The ”over the top” contribution was to have it hand written in Japanese kanji brushstrokes, pasted on to a traditional roll such as you will often see with Japanese paintings.  I attached small weights to the bottom of the roll, so that when it was unfurled, it dropped like a stone and made a slight snapping sound when fully extended.  It was a very dramatic unfurling of a surprising usage of the Japanese language and culture by a foreigner.  It was “over the top” but congruent. The audience reaction was immediate and strong.  I had achieved my aim to reorient their thinking about Australia, through the context of my talk using some showmanship. We can take the chance to stand out at different times.  We need to pick our moments and decide how far we will push things.  None of us need another vanilla presentation from some entirely forgettable speaker, but we don't need pyrotechnics every time either.  Find some spots for hitting a word hard, or using a big gesture.  Use a powerful facial expression of wonder, disgust, surprise, puzzlement, joy or anger, where it is congruent with what you are saying.  “Less is more” though is a good rule and leave the amateur theatrics to the aspirant thespians.  But where it works, do go “over the top” and engage your audience.

Team building is fraught. Actually, when do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences, aspirations and prejudices, not ours. In rare cases, we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This concept is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or whether we brought new members onboard or we started from scratch. Teams are fluid. People come and go, so there is never an end point to team building. “Yeah, it's built” would be fatal last words for a leader. Before you have even drained the champagne flute in celebration, your best performer is planning to head off to bigger and better things with your competitor.  So we are constantly adding people to the team, even if we kicked it off ourselves. New individuals arrive with their own work culture, cobbled together like a coat of many colours from their previous employment. The team has to coalesce again and again and we are the orchestra conductor. Our job is to get all the specialists to “play nice” together and in harmony. It helps to analyse what we are doing and remind ourselves that there are four stages of team building. 1.     Uncertainty If we have newly been parachuted into a team as the boss or whenever new members are injected into the existing team, we are in stage one of team building. In Japan, this is a tricky stage. If we are new, the team is uncertain of us. They have been moulded by our predecessor and have worked each other out. Here we turn up, all shiny and new with our “whacky” ideas , idiosyncrasies, foibles, penchants and talents. If we later bring in someone new, now the whole team has to regroup again. What will this person be like, are they going to be cooperative, nice, trustworthy? What will happen to my role – is it safe, will it change? Anxiety If we know in advance that there is this uncertainty stage then we can prepare for it. Often though, the “new broom” boss arrives, puffed up with their own massive self-belief, hubris, ambition and zeal.   They scare the team because they blow up everyone's comfort zone. Things start to change rapidly. Few in Japan are up for the roller coaster ride about to commence. People's roles start to change as the new boss reorganizes things. Performance standards are invariably raised, because the new leader is here to demonstrate their metal to their boss. Life becomes more fragile for some and they look for ways to protect themselves. In foreign multi-nationals, if things become too intense or too dire in Japan, then the real trouble starts. Senior executives at headquarters start to receive anonymous communication, telling them what a jerk this new boss is and pointing out in florid detail how they are destroying the Japan business. In smaller Japan operations, there is a possibility some people are going to be moved out. “Am I next?”, is a permanent question in the minds of the survivors. New people are being absorbed into the team, but this takes time. Change creates a sense of instability in the team. Are these new folk going to be “teacher's pet” because the new boss hired them or are they going to become part of the existing team? The key question for everyone is are they with “us” or “them”? Clarity The card carrying “boss watchers” in the team, that is to say, the whole team, start to work the new boss out. Their intelligence, skill set, experience, capability, emotional quotient, etc., are very carefully calibrated. The navigation required for dealing with the new boss is gradually discovered. People adjust to the new style or they just leave if they don't like it. As we know, people don't leave companies – they leave bosses. The new mid-career hire arrivals get a similar ruler run over them, to measure how well they will fit in. If they don't fit in, then the herd groups together and tries to isolate them out. So, if they stay, then they have been successfully acclimatised to the dominant culture of the work group. This is often the opposite of what the new boss desired to happen. They expected the new people would be sprinkling their pixy dust on the “old” team members and creating the internal changes needed. Consistency Presuming the new boss doesn't blow the whole thing up and go down in flames, then things start to settle down. People get used to the new work requirements, their new colleagues, new boss, new targets and get back to focusing on their work. The team might even improve their performance and enjoy the recognition which comes with success. If the boss is any good, then the team now have a greater sense of shared responsibility toward achieving the targets and to supporting each other. Just when all this harmony and light comes together, the boss gets sent somewhere else to a new role and a new shiny boss arrives. “Here we go again”, is the common refrain. The team has been here before, so they know the clock is ticking on the new arrival.  Many have worked out how to slow down change and ride the wave of instability. Building the team is complex anywhere, but short stay bosses in Japan really have their work cut out for them.  These four stages will help to provide a framework for context and agility to make the decisions required to be effective here as a team leader.

Salespeople often miss the point. They are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome.  Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company.  The product or service lines are expanded or updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme.  No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec.  These discussions, however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring.  This is ridiculous, because we know we buy on emotion and justify with logic.  If we know that, then why are we spending so much time on the logic bits?  Finding relevant stories to wrap the product or service up inside is the answer to getting clients emotionally involved.  For example, I could say, “Dale Carnegie has an excellent sales programme that is very complete and comprehensive”.  All true but very dry in the telling.  Or I could say, “In 1939 Dale Carnegie decided to revolutionise sales training.  In those days, if your company provided sales training you were trained, but if they didn't, you had to work it all out for yourself.  Dale Carnegie introduced the first public training classes for salespeople. He created the material with Percy Whiting, one of the top securities salesmen in America at that time”.  The second telling is through a story and more engaging and memorable.  It adds impressive elements about Dale Carnegie's thought leadership about sales training, his partnership with an expert salesman to create the programme and the longevity of the training methodology.  These are all USPs or unique selling propositions wrapped together in a story.  In this way they are more easily absorbed by the listener.  We think in pictures, so we need word pictures to be employed in our storytelling.  When we read books, we tend to best remember the stories being told.  We all grow up listening to stories, so our brains are hard wired to remember them with just one exposure.  A famous American sales trainer Charlie Cullen in the 1950s was one of the first to record his sales training on vinyl LPs.  His recommendations on what salespeople should do, were all backed up by examples conveyed through stories.   In more modern times, Zig Ziglar's whole approach to sales training was telling a series of parables for sales.  Growing up in America's Bible Belt, perhaps lessons communicated through parables came natural to him because of the culture of bible study in those regions. Brian Tracy, another great sales trainer is constantly mixing science and psychology with storytelling to get his point across.  Gary Vaynerchuk, the modern marketing guru and entrepreneur is a master storyteller.  They are almost exclusively about himself, but that is his style – supremely confident, self-opinionated, self-absorbed and constantly drawing on his own experience.  He has a huge following of fans, including me.  What he teaches is easy to follow because of the way he employs stories to get his key messages across. So look into your line-up of products or services and pick out the stories that go with each item.  It may come from the history.  Or it may be the technology.  It may be client stories about users and we relate what happened to them.  We need to look for an angle that will make the story interesting for the buyer. It should bolster the USPs of the offering and project pots of value.  We don't necessarily need a Hollywood production here in the storytelling.  It doesn't have to be War and Peace either. Let's keep them brief and to the point. If we can engage the listener's emotions and bring them into the story, then we are succeeding.  Can the buyer visualise what we are describing in their mind's eye? This takes some work and some creativity.  This is why it is often a good practice to involve everyone in the sales team to work together to curate some great stories and case studies of satisfied customers.  There is no doubt stories work.  When I record my own sales talk, I realise how many stories I am employing.  When I listen to the gurus of sales training, their whole underpinning platform is built on stories.  Stories work, so let's start creating them and using them with our buyers. We have tons of them, in fact.  All we have to do is collect them and arrange them to match the industry or industry segment of the buyer. Buyers want proof and stories are a way of delivering that proof. Don't forget that stories need data and data needs stories.

Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control.  You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good.  However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight.  Why a street fight?  Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules.  “Oh, that's not right” you might be thinking.  “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on bareknuckle duking it out in public?”.   That is correct but it is not a guarantee.   When doing public speaking, there are different personality types assembled in the room.  In Japan, often the English language presentation occasions are like mini-United Nations' assemblies, in terms of national representation.  Different social norms apply in countries apart from your own. My French friends tell me the French educational system promotes critique of statements and ideas and that is seen as an illustration of superior intellect. My fellow Australians are often sceptical, doubting and don't hesitate to mention it, in a direct assault on what has just been said.  There are also different personality types in the room.  Some people are naturally aggressive and want to argue the point, if the speaker has the temerity to say something they disagree with.  What is considered rude, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour is a relative judgment depending on where you grew up, how you were educated and how you individually see the world.  Even in Japanese society, there are occasions where there is heated arguement and a lot of the typical Japanese restraint is out the window.  As the speaker, we are pumped full of chemicals when we get up to present.  If we are nervous, then the flight or fight adrenaline chemicals are released by the Amygdala inside our brain.  We cannot stop this, but we can control it.  It is interesting that if this state is held for a long period of time, we lose the feeling of strength and have a sense of weakness.  A forty minute speech is a long time to be in a heightened state and by the time we get to the Q&A, we may be feeling denuded of strength.  Just at the moment when we come under full force street fighting attack.  The face of the speaker is a critical indicator during the Q&A.  I caught myself shaking my head to indicate disagreement with what was coming my way in the form of a question during the Q&A.  Without initially realising it, I was sending out a physical sign that I wasn't accepting the questioner's bead of disagreement to what I had been pontificating.  From an audience point of view, this looks like you are inflexible, closed to other opinions and just dismissive of anyone with an opinion that differs from your own.  Even if you are not a rabid head shaker like I was, the expression on your face may be speaking volumes to your audience.  You might be displaying a sceptical visage of doubt and rejection of what is being said before you have heard the whole argument out.  You might even be pumping blood into your face so that it goes red in colour.  There is a female businesswoman I know here, whose skin goes bright red when she is in the public eye and begins to look like one of those warning beacons.  There is probably nothing she can do about that, but it is definitely not a good look.  Or maybe your general demeanour is one of disdain for the questioner and you look arrogant and disrespectful of alternative opinions. Given the chemical surge leading to denuding of strength I mentioned earlier, we may look like we are defeated by the questioner. This impacts our credibility.  We need to be showing we are true believers in what we said and are fully committed to that line of argument.  We don't want to appear like we have collapsed in the face of pushback during the Q&A.  Maintain a brave front, even if it is all front.  The audience won't know the difference.  Nodding during the questioning is also a big mistake.  We do this in normal conversation, to show the speaker we are paying attention to them. Unfortunately, this bleeds over into public speaking events as well. I learnt this when I did media training.  The television media love it when you are nodding, because they can take that bit in the editing and transpose it to sync with the voice of the person disagreeing with you and it appears you are accepting their argument.  Very sneaky isn't it. When you pop up on the TV replay agreeing with your questioner attacking all that you have said, it is too late.  Even if there is no TV there, don't look like you are agreeing with the questioner and control that nodding right from the start.  So during Q&A maintain a totally neutral expression on your face and don't allow you head to nod.  If you feel anxiety from the question, take some secret slow deep breaths to slow down your heart rate and breathing.  Keep supremely calm and remember that really aggressive questioners look like dills or grandstanders to the rest of the audience. They usually place their sympathy with the person under attack.  We do have that Colosseum thing in us however, where we like watching blood sports and Q&A can come under that category.   So we have to appear above the fray, in control, calm, reasonable and assured of what we are saying.  Control your temper, don't cut them off mid-question, leave a pregnant pause after they have finished, to allow some of the tension to dissipate, then lob in a cushion or neutral statement to give you thinking time and then answer their question.   Here is a killer technique for obstreperous questioners.  When you start to answer their question, give them 100% eye contact for six seconds to show you won't be intimidated. Next switch your six second eye contact to various other members of the audience and never look at the questioner again.  By publicly and completely ignoring them, you take all the air out of their puffed up ego and you decimate them through denial of attention. Q&A must be an extension of the triumph of your presentation.  In the same way we plan for our triumph, plan for the Q&A too.  Don't leave this to chance.  Twenty minutes under direct attack during the Q&A can seem like a lifetime.  We have to be ready to weather the storm and emerge victorious

Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival's bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the recession. Usually, communication skills and people skills were not prominent in their rise to this position of trust. How do we handle such a contradiction? What does it take to be successful as a team leader? Here are nine different adhesives to help glue the team together. Don't criticize, condemn or complain When we criticize people for mistakes or poor performance, they stop listening to us and use all of their brainpower to marshal their defense or assemble their excuses, about why it isn't their fault. We have created a barrier with them and they are in denial. The scolding, harsh direct approach may make us feel better but it leads nowhere useful, so don't bother. Give honest and sincere appreciation Snowing staff with false praise or fake appreciation doesn't work. People have well-tuned gauges for flattery. When they detect it, they do two things simultaneously: they ignore it and they don't ever fully trust the perpetrator. They are saying to themselves, “Do you really think I am that dumb?”. Instead, we need to become “good finders”. Look for what people are doing well and recognise it. When we give appreciation, be very specific about what they did well, this makes it real and believable,. Look for strengths to develop, rather than trying to pull people down because they are not perfect. Arouse in the other person an eager want As leaders we want a lot of things to happen. Our targets, accountabilities and directives from above drive us. It can very quickly become all about “me” and what “I” want. Others are not that excited about what we want compared to what they want for themselves. If we can coalesce what we want with what others want we will do a lot better in terms of getting cooperation and achieving our desired outcomes. This is a communication skill we absolutely need to master. Become genuinely interested in other people We are all firmly attached to ourselves. We are the center of our universe and we want all things that are good to flow to us. As the leader though, you have to flip that self-absorption and get focused on your people. You can work 100 plus hours a week, but your team of 10, only working a 40 hour week can out work you with four times the input of hours. So working 100 hours yourself is dumb and getting your team fired up and working at peak performance is smart. Why would they do that? Because they feel there is something attractive in it for them. They feel that way because the leader has been an excellent communicator to explain the connection between hitting their own goals and hitting the firm's goals. They are committed because they trust the leader. When Dale Carnegie did it's global study on the emotional drivers of engagement, they found that “feeling valued” by the immediate supervisor was the trigger to having people become highly engaged. You have to know what your team values, in order to help them understand they are highly valued. Your personal values are only interesting to you. Their values, for them, are the key. Once you are really genuinely interested in your team, you will naturally understand what they value. Then you can arrange for good things to happen for them, based on what they want, not what you want. Smile We think we smile, but we do it more rarely than we imagine. We are swimming through a flood tide of emails, meetings and reporting every week. We are under pressure to produce the goods. Our internal rivals are nipping at our heals, our external competitors are making life hell. It becomes hard to smile in the face of difficulties. What our team sees is a serious face, maybe an explosive face, when the pressure gets too much. Our mood every day is the barometer of how the team feels. If we are stressed out, we transfer that stress to everyone and we take their mood straight down. We have to be up, regardless of the pressure, the irritations, the stress. Remember to smile and pass this on to your team, to keep their mood positive. Remember names Presumably you can remember your team's names. However, in a big organisation that may not be that easy.   In Japan, in larger operations, it is interesting that often colleagues can't remember their workmate's personal name, only their family name. You need to send an email and you ask, “what is so and so's personal name?”. The answer is often, “I don't know”. Do you know the names of those staff in the teams of your direct reports? In a small team, do you know the name of their spouse, partner, kids, pooch, pussy, etc.? Being able to recall the family member's names is a big plus, because it shows a level of attention and interest and people appreciate that. When you meet someone at a networking event and they greet you by name and you have no clue who they are, that is always a moment for reflection on your ability to recall names. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves We want to be heard, to have our input appreciated, absorbed, valued. We want recognition for our ideas and contribution. A big part of making us feel this way, is the way the other person interacts with us. If they are really leaning in and listening carefully to what we are saying we feel valued. If they are doing fake listening, we can sense it. If they are just listening so they can butt in and make their point, we feel that is insulting. So, the leader needs to stop whatever they are doing, look the person in the eye and really open the ears up and listen. Don't second guess what they are going to say, don't finish their sentences for them, don't jump in over the top and interject your thoughts. Get them talking. We know what we know, but when we let the other person speak we know what we know and we will come to learn what they know as well. People love to talk about themselves, their accomplishments, their hobbies, their troubles, their family. Let them. They will feel valued because most people couldn't be bothered listening, because they want to do all the talking themselves, about themselves! Talk in terms of the other person's interests We feel close and comfortable with people who are like us. So, when speaking with the team, get into furious agreement by creating context around their interests, so they are aligned with the organisation's interests. Look for the win-win in everything, articulate it and keep reinforcing it. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely This sounds easy, except that we are often tied up in what makes us feel important. Fake praise is spotted quickly and both we and the fake praise are instantly disregarded. Always be looking to find ways to tie the team member's contribution into the big picture. The rat on the treadmill can feel that what they are doing is rather low value, unappreciated and perhaps even pointless. This is where the leader comes in. They need to connect the dots and explain that this person's role is important, that they are appreciated and that what they do matters.  Are doing these nine things easy?  Absolutely not. Does it take effort to make these our regular modus operandi and create new habits?  Yes. Would adopting these make a big difference to the way we lead. Yes.  The best time to incorporate these nine ideas into our leadership skills set was yesterday and the second best time is now.

Enterprise killers can include Customer Service. We know that all interfaces with the customer are designed by people.  It can be on-line conversations with AI robots or in-store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ.  The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation.  That culture is the accountability of senior management.  The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer.  The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different.  Senior leaders, ambitious, ever upward individuals, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be the epitomy of customer focused.  They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service.  Love your staff and they will love your customers.  Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second.  His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first.  Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determine our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right?  Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders.  It is not a function of education, rank or longevity in the organisation.  Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team.  We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer.  Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. As the leader, to get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills.  We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills.  We could be doing things really well up in the clouds, at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation,  we have be sincere.  If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way.  People can spot fake from a mile away.  If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. Are you a “good work finder” or the opposite? We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc.  We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers.  They may however want different things.  We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want.  This is not manipulation.   This is well developed people and communication skills. In this way, the trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want.  As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others.  This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer.   When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break.  If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile.  It could be the very top executives who are too hard driving, bottom line focused and serious to smile at their staff.  They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand.  They just don't see the double standards, miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Are you self-aware enough?                                                                        Bosses are often great order givers but poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer.  What if that is not the case?  If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea.  When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer.  We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us.  In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them. One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem).  When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the sales person is hoping for.  We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer. What is your sales team focused on? I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers.  Another speaker spent the entire time just talking about his own company!  I really wondered what was the take away for the audience?  Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero.  We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client's interests.  The way we do that is by listening carefully to their answers to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose. When a customer encounters everyone of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us.  Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard.  In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way.  The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders.  If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff, cold and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook?  If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions.  Are you doing this? Another challenge for bosses is to shut up.  Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders.  They do all the talking.  The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much.  The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking.  This requires strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a differentiated culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions. It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership.  We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it.  We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create.  We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea.  We want them arriving at our preferred solution.  With this in mind, we design the questions we will ask.  It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea. The same thing is needed with our staff.  We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusions.  Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company.  Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the staff arrive at their own conclusions and it fits in with the direction we are aiming for.  This way there is no sense of harrassment or badgering of the staff.  They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer.  The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer.  This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them.  Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client's viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort.  We need to do this logically as well as emotionally.  We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer.  Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best. If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation.  This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried, black or white.  Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic.  We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer.  We want staff who are facing customers to do the same.  If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers.  It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time.  We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service. The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill.  It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture.  Time poor bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture.  If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service.  Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions.  This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built.  When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too.  So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead.   Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed.  They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing and doing it happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward.  When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly. Customer service becomes a differentiated enterprise builder, expander and business success driver. That is what we want isn't it?  

Don't let your speaker introduction be a disaster. Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice.  Once at the very start by the MC when they kick off proceedings and then later just before our segment of the talk.  The MC's role is quite simple.  It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience.  This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors. How big a risk taker are you? Are you relying on the MC to do the necessary research on you? Are you sure they can properly encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject?  Most people in the MC role are not expert or trained speakers.  Usually, they are clueless about this MC gig and just happen to have control over you for this brief interlude.  They are probably too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of preparing your intro and often they won't appreciate what particular points need grander highlighting than others.  Be warned.  It is always best to prepare your own excellent introduction.  Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic.  Don't make it too long though, because we are in the Age of Distraction, where audience concentration spans are frankly pathetically brief.   I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life.  He obviously couldn't discriminate between very, very high points, very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a single lengthy unit.  I wasn't the MC that evening, but the actual MC simply ignored the whole thing altogether, deposed their own role and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won't go through it now”.  Well, yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail.  Thanks to this lazy and incompetent MC, the chance to reconnect with what was in the flyer was no longer there for the speaker. As you can imagine, the person in the MC role can be difficult to handle for the speaker.  They can choose to ignore everything you wrote and then give their own ad hoc version.  Usually this is laced full of distortions, errors, exaggerations, serious gaps and miscommunication.  Some MCs have pretty big egos too. They think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from you as the speaker.  What actually comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement to you, because you know what they were supposed to say. It is seriously late by then though and no repairs are possible. For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points. Completely deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable or unsatisfactory.  You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience.  When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want to highlight about your glorious career thus far. I would also not rush into your background immediately following on from the MC.  We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway.  The start of the talk has only one purpose. That is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience from secretly reaching for their phone, to escape from you, to the irresistible charms and siren calls of the internet. Take the first few seconds of your talk very, very seriously. Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience. Only after that introduce yourself, rather than the other way around.  Starting with your history is too passe, too expected. It doesn't get any excitement going. When you get to your self-introduction, rather than reading your resume, look for opportunities to tell a brief story that brings some highlights to the attention of the listeners.  This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are.  This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn't get too long and too detailed.  We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you.  Make it positive rather than negative.  In other words, set yourself up for success. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you suffered and eventually learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light.  This is what you want people to associate you with – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning.  Don't allow your introduction by the MC just unfold like a train wreck, with you standing there as a horrified, innocent bystander. Grab hold of the key content and feed certain parts to the MC to allow them to do a proper job.  Don't miss this – tell the MC to stick to the script. Be insistent, because these are your personal and professional brands we are talking about here. Keep the really juicy parts of your intro for yourself, and so set the scene for your speech to be a great success.  Prime your audience for what is to come. We don't get that many opportunities in business to speak, so let's go for the best outcome we can manufacture and not let anyone get in our way of achieving that. Be nice about it, but be bolshie about your protecting your intro.

Suddenly you hear your name being called upon and you are being requested to make a few remarks.  Uh oh.  No preparation, no warning and no escape.  What do you do?  Extemporaneous speaking is one of the most difficult tasks for a presenter.  It could be during an internal meeting, a session with the big bosses in attendance or at a public venue.  One moment you are nice and comfy, sitting there in your chair, taking a mild interest in the proceedings going on around you and next you are the main event. Usually the time between your name being called and you actually being handed the microphone can be counted in milliseconds.  By the time you have heaved yourself out of your chair, your brain has well and truly started to panic.  A mental whiteout is probably fully underway and your face is going red, because of all the blood pressure of the moment. Here are a couple of things we can do in this situation.  Firstly, take a realistic look at the task at hand.  The length of your talk will not be expected to be long.  If you are a seasoned speaker, you could get up and wax lyrical for an hour without a problem.  For everyone else, we are talking two to three minutes.  Now two to three minutes seems rather short, except when you are suddenly thrust in front of a sea of expectant eyes of an audience. Once upon a time, I completely forgot my next sentence and discovered the pain of prolonged time. I was asked to give a brief talk and chose to speak in Mandarin to a crowd of around a thousand people, when I was Consul General in Osaka. It was a special event for the departing Chinese Consul General Li, who was heading to New York.  Actually, I was going okay but I paused to allow some applause to die down – this turned out to be a major error on my part.  I found when you suddenly go blank, a single microphone stand doesn't provide much cover, up on a very big stage, with all the lights on you and everyone staring at you.  That 30 seconds or so of silence, where I was totally lost and unable to recall what came next, seemed like a lifetime.  So I know that two to three minutes can appear really daunting when suddenly called upon to speak. Begin by thanking whoever unceremoniously dragged you up the podium for the chance to say a few words.  Try and smile at them, through gritted teeth if you have to.  You have to say something, so take the occasion and put your comments into some form of context.  You can use the concept of time as your ally.  For example, this is where we were, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future.  This past, present, future construct will work for just about any occasion and any subject.  That is the type of ready to go format you need to be able to call upon when you don't have much preparation time up your sleeve. Another good construct is macro and micro.  Talk about the big picture issues related to the occasion, then talk about some of the micro issues.  This is useful for putting the event into a frame you can speak about easily.  There is always a big and small picture related to any topic.  Again, this construct travels easily across occasions and events. We can use the weather, the location, the season or the time of the day as a theme.  We can put this event into any of those contexts rather easily.  Remember, it doesn't have to be a long presentation.  We can talk about people that everyone would know, who are related to the event.  They might be present or absent.  We can make a few positive remarks about our host.  Then we can thank everyone for their attention, wish them our best and get off the stage.  Let me give you a real life example.  I was at an event for Ikebana International, sitting there calmly minding my own business, when I heard the speaker suddenly call me up to the stage to say a few words.  I had the time from standing up to walk to the podium to compose myself about what on earth I would say.  At the extreme outside that time gap was probably 10 seconds.  I was going to need to speak in Japanese, so that just added another level of excitement to the challenge.  It had been raining that day, so I miraculously dreamed up a water related analogy.  I began by thanking the host for allowing me to say a few words, although I secretly I wasn't so happy about being put on the spot.  I mentioned that the stems of the Australian cut flowers that were being exhibited that day, contained water and soil from Australia, as they had just arrived that morning by air.  I said that as a result here in Japan we had a little bit of Australia present and each of these flowers were like a floral ambassador linking the two countries together.  I then wished everyone all the best for the event and got out of the firing line pronto.  Probably not an award winning talk, but good enough for that occasion, with that amount of notice.  And that is the point.  You need to be able to say something reasonable rather than remarkable to complete your sudden duties.  So always have a couple of simple constructs up your sleeve if you are suddenly asked to speak without warning.  Don't just turn up thinking you can be an audience member and can switch off or these days start immersing yourself in your phone screen.  Imagine you were suddenly singled out for action and have your construct ready to go just in case.  You may not be called upon, but everyone around you will be impressed that you could get up there and speak without warning.  The degree of difficulty here is triple back flip with pike sort of dimension and everyone knows it. They are all thinking what a nightmare it would have been, had it been them up there in the firing line. You will be surprised how much a difference that little bit of preparation will make to coming across as professional, rather than uming and ahing your way through a total shambles of a talk.  Your personal brand will become golden for the sake of a bit of forward planning.  Now that would be worth it don't you think.

Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home. There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive. Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map.   We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff. Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan.   Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard. Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat. If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won't be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren't going anywhere sunshine, remember that”. Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society. Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn't usually that smart or well informed enough to know that.   HQ is demanding Japan's results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!  

Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience.   However don't have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time.  That just wears an audience out and wears you out too.  Instead, you need to have some variation.  Very strong and then sometimes very soft.  And I mean drop it right down.  Remember to have that in the voice range.  Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper.   I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe.  It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country.  It was powerful, a very powerful presentation.  It was an urging my comrades to “man the barricades” type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don't know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation.  It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him.  So he got peoples' attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, “wow look at that”.  That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work.  I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft.  So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode.  Variety is the key. I said before gestures are very important.  Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things.  If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger.  If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important.  When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height.  Don't hold gestures around waist height.  It is too low and people struggle to see it.  Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height.  That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures.  When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out.  Don't be afraid of big gestures.  Use gestures that are congruent.  Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though.  It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative.  Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don't hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh.  That activity creating noise becomes distracting.  Just use the gestures by themselves.  As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want.  You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down.  That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing.  Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move. Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do.  If you get there early, meet some of your audience.  Have a conversation with someone.  It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, “I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends.  In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said “blah, blah, blah…”  Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk.  They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it.  The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening.  Refer to people by name.  It is very, very effective.  Don't leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience.   Let's concentrate on the basics.  What is the point of your presentation?  Who is your audience?  What is the point?  Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners.  Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making.  Don't just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation.  You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to?  What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it.  I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan.  I have never given the same presentation twice, ever.  Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation.  Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker.  And it also keeps it fresh for an audience.  If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too.  They will feel stimulated and interested as well.  Be wary of receiving the presentation pack. You often see the CEO had some munchkins out the back preparing the presentation for him or her.  Often, it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation.  Sadly, it is obvious that it is the first time they have seen the presentation.  They don't know what's coming next and they struggle through it.  This is really killing the brand.  It is killing the brand and the organization.  It is killing the presenter's personal brand.  You don't want that.  Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it.   So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which are based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures.  It's really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills.  This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912,teaching people how to be persuasive.  If ever you have a chance, after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven't done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course.  It's a game changer of a training course.   I have taken it myself and I strongly recommend it. So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.  Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials.  They are secondary to you.  But when you do construct your materials use these ideas, these hints and you will give a much, much better presentation.   

This is a tricky part of designing and delivering our presentations.  Think back to the last few presentations you have attended and can you remember anything from the close of their speech?  Can you remember much about the speaker? This close should be the highlight of their talk, the piece that brings it all together, their rallying cry for the main message.  If you can't recall it, or them, then what was the point of their giving the talk in the first place?  People give talks to make an impression, to promulgate their views, to win fans and converts, to impact the audience, etc.  All weighty and worthy endeavours, but all seemingly to no effect, in most cases.  What can we do to stand above this crowd of nobodies, who are running around giving unmemorable and unimpressive talks? The keys to any successful talk revolve around very basic principles.  Vince Lombardi, famed American Green Bay Packers football coach would always emphasise that the road to success in his game was blocking and tackling – the basics and so it is with public speaking.  Design must not start with the assembly of the slide deck.  Yet this is how 99% of people do it.  Instead start with designing the final closing message.  In other words start with how you will finish.  This forces clarity on you, drives you to sum up the key takeaways in one sentence and gets to the heart of what it is you want to say.  It is also excruciatingly difficult, which is why we all head for the slide deck formation instead. Once we have sieved the gold nugget from the dross, grasped the key point of the talk, then we are ready to work on the rest of the speech.  The main body of the talk will flow naturally from the close, as we assemble data, facts, examples, stories, testimonials and statistics to support our main point.  We then array this vast army of persuasion ready for deploy at our summation.  It must flow in a logical progression, easy to follow for the audience and all pointing back to support our main contention. The opening and close can have some connection or not.  The role of the opening is very clear – grab the attention of the assembled masses to hear what it is we want to say.  We can state our conclusion directly at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying that position.  Or we can provide some general navigation about what we are going to talk about today.  Or we can hit the audience with some nitro statement or information, to wake them up to get them to listen to us. At the end there will be two closes, one before the Q&A and one after.  The majority of speakers allow the final question to control the proceedings rather than themselves.  If that last question is a hummer, a real beauty, right on the topic and allowing you to add extra value to your talk, then brilliant.  How many times have you seen that though?  Usually the last questions are a mess.  All the better, intelligent questions have been taken, the best insights have been plumbed and now we have some dubious punter who wants a bit of your limelight.  Their questions can often be off topic, rambling, unclear or just plain stupid.  Is this how you want your talk remembered?    The final two closes can reflect each other and be an extension of what you have already said or you can split them up and give each its specific task to make your point.  The close before the Q&A can be a summation to remind your audience of what you spoke about and prime them for questions.  Obviously recency, the last thing people will hear, will have the most powerful impact, so the second close must be very carefully designed.  Be careful of the event hosts wanting to take over immediately after the last question and not allowing you the chance to make your final close.  You might have gone overtime or they need to vacate the venue or face a bigger bill or whatever.  They can be thanking the audience for coming and wrapping things up with their news of their next event, before you can blink an eye.  You need to word them up at the start that you want to make a final close after the Q&A and then you will give them the floor. The other component of the close is the delivery.  So many speakers allow their voices to trail off and allow their speaking volume to descend at the peroration.  You want to be remembered as someone passionate about your subject, excited to be there to share it with this audience and a true believer of your message.  That means you need to drive the volume up, hit the last words with a lot of passion and belief.  Make it a rousing call to action, to storm the barricades and to change the world.  That is how you want people to remember your message AND you as a speaker as they shuffle out of the venue and go back to work or home.

As the leader we have to work on the presumption that people know what they are doing. It is impossible to micro manage every single person, every moment of the day. By the way, who would want to do that anyway? The issues arise when things deviate from the track we think they are on or expect that they are on. We find that a process has been finessed, but we don't like the change. We find that some elements have been dropped completely, but we only find this out by accident or substantially after the fact. We are not happy in either case. Why does this happen? Training can cover the basics, but there is always a wide margin of discretion in carrying out jobs. We need to allow this or the team become asphyxiated by the confines of the narrowly defined tasks we have set for them. We all own the world we help to create, so we need to allow people to be creative, if we want them to take ownership of their jobs. It is when things start to stray that we run into trouble. There is a margin allowed for doing things differently, but when the red line gets crossed, we get cross. Another seed of discomfort is when systems are changed, but you don't know that. There might be a really great reason or a very bad reason for this to happen, but the scary part is not knowing the change has been made in the first place. Do we have to know about every single thing our staff are changing? Obviously no, so where is the line in the sand to be drawn here?  This is tricky and there are no genius answers really. We need to remind our team that they are free to innovate, to be creative, to look for every kaizenopportunity. We also need to have them tell us if they make a significant change. Okay, so how do we define “significant”? This is a very grey area and this still won't capture everything we need to know about, but it is better than having no clue at all as to what is going on. Our workplace is usually divided into specialty functions like sales, marketing, operations etc. Cross functional innovation is good, if both groups know about it and contribute. Problems start to arise when the changes are made in isolation and in secret. Not secret in the sense that anyone is trying to fool others, but secret in the sense that affected groups are not told what is going to happen. It just happens and you find out later – usually at the worst possible time. The changes can also reflect an uninformed view of how things work in reality. Not having in depth detail on the sales function, for example, can result in the operations team making some decisions which negatively impact the sale effort. IT may make changes that are completely rational from a geeky IT point of view, but which create results for other parts of the business which are not helpful. Undoing things always takes time and money and results in lost productivity.              What can we do about these challenges? Having functional heads keep an eye for any negative changes, is a delegation task that must be done. The leader cannot get across that degree of detail. Educating the whole team about how the whole fits together is a good practice. We assume everyone gets it, but that is wishfull thinking. In team meetings, it is important that all sections report changes that will impact other parts of the business. Formalise this into the meeting agenda so that it never gets missed. When things do go off the rails, educate those involved about the big picture, so that it won't happen again. No one is trying to destroy the business, so intentions are honourable, but the communication piece can be missing. Encourage staff to think about the ramifications of changes they may want to make and have them inform those likely to be affected before the changes are made. Surprisingly, even in small offices, this simple activity fails to happen because everyone is so time harassed doing multiple tasks at light speed. Japan has it horenso ( 報連相) mantra to fall back on when in doubt. Ho for hokoku or report, ren for renraku or contact and so for sodan or consult. This is a useful construct to reduce problems before they occur, especially for junior staff – report/contact/consult. Finally, don't blow your top! Being the last to know about bad news is the lot of the boss. That is bad enough, but finding out randomly about bad news, that only you understand is bad news, is really, really irritating. The instant boss reaction to this type of thing is usually explosive. We have to remember the importance of encouraging everyone to innovate. The corresponding increase in risk of failure goes hand in glove with that effort. We have to remember to be using our communication and people skills, so that we don't kill team motivation. Bite your tongue when things are revealed and start thinking of a positive way of encouraging everyone involved, as you correct the situation. If we can do this, we will be building the culture of creativity we want and over time we will diminish the outbursts of common sense collapse.

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 is driving original content creation and release.  LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are favouring live video, so we have to become television talents.  Voice is the next big thing, so podcasting requires us to be radio personalities.  If you are in business, your personal information is out there, easily searchable and found.  We check out the buyers and they check out the sellers, before we meet. When you turned up at a client meeting eighty years ago, you came with some good jokes, some market information, some competitor intelligence, etc.  You did this to break the ice with the buyer.  Even if they were an established client, you needed to break the ice for that day.  Buyers then and buyers now have a lot going on inside their heads when we turn up and almost none of it has anything to do with us and what we want. In Japan, meeting room space is always at a premium, so getting time with buyers has some automatic limitations placed upon it with certain companies.  After thirty minutes you are given the bum's rush, because that space has been booked for the next meeting and they are loitering with intent outside the glass wall waiting to get in for their meeting.  That doesn't give us much time to carve out some mind space with the buyer, get into questioning mode, talk about the solution, deal with any objections and seal the deal.  If the first part of the meeting isn't well planned then there won't be any result.  We cannot let the first few interactions be random events.  We need to plan in detail how we are going to establish some rapport with this buyer or reestablish some rapport if they are an existing buyer. We will have checked some of the media aggregation sites to see if there has been anything released in to the public arena about the client company, which we can then refer to.  If it is a first meeting then checking the annual report is a must.  There will be a glossy coverage of the CEO's vision and strategy for the enterprise, with photographs in a swish corporate setting.  We are looking for things we can ask about in this meeting.  Our objective is to get the client talking as soon as possible.  Most salespeople still cling to the idea that they have to dominate the airwaves, so they just keep talking, talking, talking.  We don't want that.  We only have a limited amount of time, so we want the client talking as much as possible.  When we do that, the client will have stopped thinking about all of the other things going on in their work and private lives. We will be concentrated on the business at hand and that is exactly what we need. We hopefully will be able to check whether some insight we have found is relevant to what they are doing.  We deal with that industry vertical so we are picking up ideas across companies on what is working and not working.  We share these ideas as a means of demonstrating we provide value to their enterprise.  They may not go for it, but they will go for our intention to assist them to make their business more successful. A discussion with a drill manufacture company I called upon, prompted a suggestion by me that they copy Blendtec's “will it blend” phenomenon, but for drills not blenders.  Blendtec's CEO Tom Dickson video's the blending of iPads, golf balls, whatever and post it on YouTube and they get massive views.  My idea was to copy this for Japan and create some buzz around the product line up.  They didn't go for it in the end, but I have no doubt that I have a closer relationship with the President today, because of my effort to think out of the box for them.  I had his attention for our discussion. Getting the full attention of the buyer is no longer a given.  They are permanently distracted today and we are competing with so much noise, more than ever before.  We need to have a strategy to get their attention.   We cannot leave it to chance or expect that, “of course they will be paying attention – we have an appointment”.  That concept is way too indulgent. Ask well thought through questions to get them talking, bring insights and valuable market intelligence.  Today, we have to do this every time, even if they are an established buyer.  Just because we have a relationship with them, doesn't mean we have automatically broken through all the completion for their attention.   Start fresh every time as if it were the very first meeting.  In this modern age this is the new normal.

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 different to the West.  In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more.  We don't think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn't clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question.  We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren't smart enough to get the speaker's meaning the first time around.  We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question.  We don't fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot. Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks.  They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic.  They don't mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner.  The advantage of this method is that the audience don't have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question.  They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained.  There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.  This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up.  They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time.  In today's Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience.  Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A.  Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point.  Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question.  The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk. The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk.  You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience.  It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order.  The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don't have to remember the order, we just follow the slides.  Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk.  Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme. Time control becomes much easier.  We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A.  If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge.  Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say.  We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say.  The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone's recollection of you as the speaker.  Also, if we don't know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble.  A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look. So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it.  For those who don't present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.  

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 fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can't be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building. Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”. Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven't chosen the team. We have inherited someone else's criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose? We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know.  Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual's values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high. A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it.  Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”. A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there. Our mission is the other building block.   It describes what we do and by definition, what we don't do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it. Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.  

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 there are more of us who need the cooperation of others, than those who can succeed despite others.  The age of the “one” has been taken over by the age of the “many”.  Hero teams are more powerful than individual heroes. The problem is although we may need the cooperation of others, we are not that good at getting it.  We limit our scope through two key areas – how we communicate and how we react.  We like what we like and we find affinity with those who like similar things.  We like to speak in a certain way and we click with others who speak the same way.  It might be a shared accent, denoting a similar background, and we are all pretty good at spotting the subtleties of dialect.  That is okay, but it still doesn't help us to go far enough.  You might share a common accent, but that doesn't mean you get on with everyone from back home Reflecting the preferences of others is a much more effective way of building trust and cooperation.  Does this mean being two faced and manipulative?  No, it means being flexible and other focused rather than me, me, me focused.  When we are speaking with others we notice the way they prefer to communicate.  It will vary from very low energy to high output - softly spoken to plain loud.  Neither side likes the other much.  The loud person can't hear the softly spoken person and feels annoyed, because they have to struggle to hear what they are saying.  The softly spoken person is quietly upset, because they don't like people who are loud and aggressive. The key here is to adjust ourselves to suit the situation and the other person, if we want to gain their cooperation.  If you say, “well I am me, I have my rights and they should adjust themselves to how I like it”, then let me know how that is working out for you? We will need to increase our energy and volume when we speak with high output people.  We may feel like we are screaming, but on their scale all we are doing is communicating normally.  The opposite applies, when we have to drop the volume and the strength.  We may feel like we are whispering and it is killing us, but the counterparty feels very comfortable chatting with you. Some individuals are really detail oriented, they are constantly seeking data, proof, evidence about what they are being told.  When we interact with this group, we notice the micro focus immediately and so we need to start adding a lot more detail to our explanations or recommendations.  We may feel this is too nitty gritty and frankly, massive overkill, but that is not how they see it.  For them this is absolutely normal and unremarkable. The opposite preference is for big picture discussions.  Don't worry about the details, the practicality, the roll out - we will get to that later.  They want to plot the future direction in broad brush terms.  For detail orientated people this is painful, because everything seems fluffy and unrealistic.  Don't fight it – encourage them to go big and go with them.  Put up some crazy ideas (judged crazy from your evidence based thinking point of view) of your own and don't feel guilty.  They will welcome all crazy ideas, including yours. When we hear something we don't like, we often react first and think later.  Bad approach!  Instead, bite your tongue and hear them out – don't jump in over the top of them with your counter idea, critique or cutting comment.  Try ear, brain, mouth rather than ear, mouth, brain as an order of approach.  Use a “cushion”, a sentence that is neither for nor against what they are saying.  It is a neutral statement, used to simply break our usual pattern of too rapid intervention.  It gives us crucial time to think about what we want to say and how we are going to say it.  Before we comment or attempt to criticise them, we instead ask them why they think that or why they say that.  While they are providing some background and context around their position, we are able to bypass our immediate chemical reaction and reach deeper down to our calmer second or even third, considered response.  When we do speak we may even accept their position because the context made sense or be able to suggest a counter position.  We can do this in a calm way, that doesn't lead to an argument and bad feelings. These two actions on our part will build the trust and establish the lines of communication required to convince other to help us on our own hero team journey.  Speak in a reflective manner and don't react immediately to what you are hearing.  You may think this is killing you, because it is so different to how you normally operate, but if you want to be effective with all types of people, this is the secret – adjust yourself first.  Newtonian physics says for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Fine, but we don't want that – we want a different and improved reaction, so let's change our own angle of approach with others, so that we get a much better response. Action Steps Be flexible and be focused on those with whom you are communicating: If they are micro, you go micro If they are macro, you go macro If they are fast paced, then speed up If they are moderate in pace, then slow down When you hear something you don't like use ear, brain, mouth Before you reply, use a cushion to give yourself time to craft your response  

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 telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call.  All bad.  When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear.  That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client's business?  What can we do that will grow the buyer's revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to  questions such as  “how will I make my monthly sales quota?”, “how will I stop being fired?”, etc.  The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth. If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives.  When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in.  The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options.  It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work.  Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers. When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale.  When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale's call we start to understand what the client needs.  We may realise that what we have isn't really a fit.  When we don't have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway.  This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities.  We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders.  We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation.  We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare.  Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive. We are better to say “no”.   When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it.  If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are.  It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation. A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name.  The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me.  It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work.  The money mentioned was so, so and really didn't cover the extra work that would be needed.  I introduced the deal to a “frenemy” rival company and asked if they were interested.  They said yes and so I connected them with the seller.  I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company.  A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the “squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer” play.  The “frenemy” took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts.  This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet.  Saying “no” was a very, very good choice on my part.  It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business.  This made it less attractive, because I couldn't see any return on the investment of time and effort. I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business.  Say “no” to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals.  You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.

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 line we must tread carefully.  When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant. We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics.  We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying.  The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences.   A great way to do this is telling our war stories.  The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past.  In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won't they. Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities.  When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point.  As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings.  I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures.  He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo? A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions.  These are questions for which we don't require an actual answer, but the audience don't know that.  This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise.  Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there. Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences.  In this case, the speaker's example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled.  This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality.  They can take the speaker's example and either agree with it or disagree with it.  Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion.  We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting.  Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do?  Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”.  We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client. Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous.  How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories.  If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us.  If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn't happen by itself.  We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk.  It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal.  Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience.  Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic?  How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk?  Case closed! In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early.  We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech.  We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that's right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue.  This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before.  There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too.  It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.

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 meltdown and the impact this had on the job market.  They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011.  They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough. In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs.  The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment.  This figure was only 65% in 2004.  Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004.  There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again.  They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns. They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.  They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France).  They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives.  Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today's figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand.  The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further.  They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them.  They will be the last juku or cram school generation.  University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements.  Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits.  Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students.  The Millennial's successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics' Generation”,  will have an entirely different perspective on education.  “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don't aim for the elite universities.  Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff.  What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids.  That will have to disappear quite soon.  This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave.  When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior.  The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn't cooperate, because others will and she will move on.    Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn.  This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free.  This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility. Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers.  The wooing to move will be constant.  We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth.  That cannot last much longer.  Certainly this Olympics' Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand. The key word for this Olympics' Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted.  Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation.  The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast.  Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders.  Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare.  Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training).  There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership.  Is anyone in Japan thinking about this?  I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”.  You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.

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 would be masters of dealing with this type of response.  You would be wrong.   The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason.  I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training.  It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople. They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it.  Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results. The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive.  Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes.  We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right.  WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered.  What a complete waste of time.  Instead we need to get smart.  Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control.  Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous.  Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous.  That intervention comes in the form of a cushion.  No, we don't put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out.  We put it over our brain instead.  We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation. The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time.  Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that “no” into a “yes”?  Nope.  We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup.  We need to go into question mode.    When we hear a “no” it is a headline, like we have in newspapers.  A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more.  We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline.  Why is it  “no”?  So we sweetly and gently ask, “May I ask you why you said “no”; or “your price is too high”; or “we are happy with our current supplier”; or “we have no budget for this”; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection.  Now we have to be patient.  We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack.  We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy.  Hold your horses there pardner.  What if this isn't the killer objection?  What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity?  We need to keep digging.  After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, “Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?”.  They will usually have another one.  Again we don't go into rambunctious reply mode.  We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time.  They tell us and again we must be patient.  We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve.  Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, “Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don't rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort. We sweetly and gently ask, “You have mentioned A, B and C.  Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?”, and then we shut up and don't even breath, let alone speak.  They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two.  Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day. When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in.  We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn't answer right then and there.  Okay, that is an exaggeration.  Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer.  Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import.  “A” was price by the way and “C” was quality in this case.  We don't know what to answer until we know what to rebuff.  Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don't be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges.  If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.

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 might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign.  The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him.  He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years.  He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic.  So what went wrong?  Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue?  When a speech doesn't flow well, the audience has to work hard.  Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you.  This was one of those cases. If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well.  In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation.  He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow.  That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics.  The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well.  This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.  We design our talks from the idea spark.  In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience.  This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity.  We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming. The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in.  Think of the sections like chapters in a book.  The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow.  They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows.  To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true?  The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences.  We need to get these down and then get them in order.  It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”.  We could use a macro-micro split.  This is the big picture and here are the details of the components.  It could be advantage-disadvantage.  We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing.  It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right. The key is in the sequencing.  What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next?  We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point.  We can't just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves.  We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it. Visuals on screen do assist in this process.  It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience.  When we don't have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures. So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction.  What is the point you want to make?  What are the reasons for that  and turn them into chapter headings.  Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow.  Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention.  If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience.  Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.  

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 our employ.  The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation.  That culture is the accountability of senior management.  The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer.  The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different.  Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused.  They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service.  Love your staff and they will love your customers.  Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second.  His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first.  Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right?  Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders.  It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation.  Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team.  We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer.  Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it.  To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills.  We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills.  We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it.  If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation,  we have be sincere.  If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way.  People can spot fake from a mile away.  If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc.  We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers.  They may however want different things.  We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want.  This is not manipulation.   This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want.  As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others.  This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer.   When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break.  If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile.  It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff.  They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand.  They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here.   Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer.  What if that is not the case?  If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea.  When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer.  We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us.  In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them. One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem).  When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the salesperson is hoping for.  We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer.    I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers.  Another speaker before me spent the entire time just talking about his own company!  I really wondered what was the take away for the audience?  Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero.  We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client's interests.  The way we do that is by listening to their answers, to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose. When a customer encounters one of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us.  Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard.  In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way.  The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders.    If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook?  If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions. Another challenge for bosses is to shut up.  Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders.  They do all the talking.  The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much.  The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking.  This requires a strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a different type of culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions. It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership.  We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it.  We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create.  We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea.  We want them coming up with our preferred solution.  We design the questions we will ask, with this in mind.  It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea. The same thing is needed with our staff.  We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusion.  Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company.  Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the client arrives at their own conclusion and it matches the one we had previously reached.  This way there is no sense of hard push sales or badgering of the buyer.  They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer.  The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer.  This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them.  Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client's viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort.  We need to do this logically as well as emotionally.  We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer.  Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best. If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation.  This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried.  Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic.  We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer.  We want staff who are facing customers to do the same.  If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers.  It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time.  We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service. The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill.  It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture.  Bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture.  If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service.  Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions.  This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built.  When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too.  So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead.  Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed.  They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing, happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward.  When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly.

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 longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There are prices set for goods and services. Goods are tangible items and plotting the costs and the margin of profit are relatively straight forward. Buy low and sell high is an old business maxim. Services are more difficult to price because they are intangibles. In both cases, the value proposition of the price against what is being delivered, is the communication piece that salespeople have to master in order to be successful. Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale's guy, I was astounded by a few things he said as we discussed selling over lunch. I was interested in hearing what his sales process was. He didn't really understand my question because he had no defined process. He had been selling for this firm for seven years so he was an experienced salesperson. He contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote, he told me. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client's needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good. He was impressed by this structural approach to the sales call, as he should have been, because he was certainly doing it the hard way. Having a roadmap makes the whole process much easier for both buyer and seller. I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing. He was an experienced guy, but that was the best he could come up with. Why would that be? He didn't have any other knowledge about how to deal with that type of situation. Do you think price comes up fairly regularly in sales conversations with buyers? Of course it does, so how could this continue like this, as if it were acceptable. He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven't seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know. I have been told “too expensive”, which I recognise is a short form summary of a host of reasons for not proceeding. When I questioned the why, it was a “budget issue”. Now as sale's professionals we have to dig deeper, “why is it a budget issue?”. “Because that number will exceed our budget allocation for that quarter”. That means it is not too expensive after all. It is just too expensive if paid in one quarter, but fully capable of purchase if the payments are split across quarters. Except you would never know that, if your response was to drop your price by 20%. Would you be willing to help the client out and split the payments across quarters? I would guess you would prefer that to having to drop your price. The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don't confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don't imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very low.

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 within them.  Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn't be done on the fly.  If you want to get yourself into trouble then ask the wrong question, at the wrong time, in the wrong way and brace yourself for the reaction. There is a cadence to any talk or presentation and in the planning phase we can break the delivery down to five minute blocks.  It doesn't have to be five, it could be four or six, but five minutes is a long enough time to go deep with a thought, idea or imparting some information without losing the concentration of the audience. Actually, audience concentration spans are a nightmare today.  They have become so short and everyone has become addicted to multitasking.  Even if they are enjoying the presentation, they are scrolling through their screens right in front of you anyway, without any hint of shame.   This is the new normal folks.  We will face this problem forever and we are never going back to the good old days of people politely listening to us right through our presentations. This is why we need to be switching up the presentation every five minutes or so, to keep the audience intrigued with what we are presenting.  This is where great information or insights really help.  The audience access to something new or valuable will pry them away from their phone screens for a few minutes longer.  We will need to be using the full range of our vocal delivery skills to keep them with us.  Any hint of a monotone delivery and the hand held screens will light up and be blazing throughout the room. Questions are an additional assist to break through the competing focus for audience attention.  By simply asking a well constructed question we can grab audience attention.  Even a simple question can work.  If I suddenly asked you, “What month were you born in?”, you will return your attention to me from wherever you were straying.  In our talk, we may have been waffling along taking about some pressing issue or downloading some precious data, losing our listeners in the process.  However, when we lob in a question, we magically get all eyes back on us.  We have now gotten the audience thinking about the point we have raised. The downside with asking questions though is people in the audience want to answer them.  They see the question as a great opportunity for them to intervene in the proceedings.  They may have a counterview and enjoy the chance to debate with us.  They may have their own personal agenda and this break in the traffic is perfect for them to weigh in with what they think.  They may even get into debates amongst themselves and exclude us entirely.  Within no time at all, the proceedings have been hijacked and we are no longer in control of the agenda.  This is where rhetorical questions are so handy.  They give us the ability to capture the mental attention of our audience on the topic we are discussing, get them engaged, but we maintain control.  A rhetorical question and a real question are identical.  The audience cannot distinguish one from the other.  This is good, because we can keep them guessing.  What we want them thinking about is whether this is a question they have to answer and are they ready to do that or is this a rhetorical question and all they have to do is listen?  The difference between the two is the timing of the break before our next contribution.  If we stop there and invite answers then they know it is time to speak up.  If we leave a pregnant pause, but then answer the question or add to it, then they know they are not being required to contribute. The key point here is to design the questions into the talk at the start. In those five minute blocks we need to have little attractions to keep interest.  They might be powerful visuals, great storytelling, vocal range for effect or rhetorical questions.  The key is to have variety planned from the start.  In a 40 minute speech, apart from the opening and the closings, there are going to be 5-6 chances to grab strong attention.  At the start we can use vocal range and visuals but as we get to the middle and toward the end, we need to bring in the bigger guns as people's concentration begins to fade out.  We can't flog the audience with a series of rhetorical questions and wear them down.  We can maybe get in two or maximum three in a forty minute presentation.  Any activity we repeat with our audience gets boring very fast.  Anything that smacks of manipulation absolutely gets the wrong response. There is a fine line to be walked here. We do want to control the agenda, the debate, the timing, the attention of the listeners, without appearing controlling.  Sprinkling a couple of well constructed rhetorical questions into our presentation will help us to maintain interest. We need to defeat our screen based, social media and internet addictive attention rivals.  Get used to this, because this is the future for all of us as presenters and we have to lift our game to make sure we are in a position to have a powerful influence with our audiences.  The alternative is speaker oblivion.    

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 short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes.  It always good to have evidence around pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on research we did in the USA, on what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful.  REAL is composed of these key elements – Reliable, Empathetic, Aspirational and Learner.  “Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice.  “Managing upwards” is a buzzword for describing how to deal with one's boss.  It used to be called “sucking up to the boss” to get ahead.  Climbing the greasy pole meant taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming others for mistakes and stepping on the bodies of your staff, to elevate your own brilliant career.  Reliable however is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority.  “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty.  Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished.  Misunderstandings arise, usually traced back to poor communication.  More work need by bosses! “Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills.  Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don't know what that viewpoint is.  The Japanese expression kuki wo yomu or summing up the real situation, is a great phrase to explain emphathy.  What is being said is important but more often, what isn't being said is where all the insight is buried.  Busy bosses though don't have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace.  Some don't care – just get me the numbers – or else!  Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost.  If we want to know what is really going on and what people are really thinking, we have to spend time and work at it.  Expressing we actually do care is also another orphan amongst communication skills.  Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people. “Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture.  Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon.  It means communicating beyond this quarter's goals and placing each individual's role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal.  The framed glass protects the vision statement, ceremoniously hung on the wall. While it may not fade in the sunlight, it fades in the collective memory.  No one can recite it, let along live it, so it is as meaningful as the flower arrangement on the reception desk.  Pleasant enough idea but ephemeral.  The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually.  This takes time, which is why so few organisations get any return on their investment in their vision statement. “Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience.  Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key.  Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business.  They are up to date on Facebook but way behind where the industry is headed and where their company needs to go.  Well informed yet ignorant, because they lack perspective and acuity.  If we aren't prepared to permanently kill our darlings, our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors. REAL, another acronym heaven dweller, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power.  We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them.  Let's change that.

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 straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach.  We certainly don't apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechanics of the execution.  Why is that?   Poor leadership and lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team launches forth rocking and rolling with no strategy and little expertise. Often, there is no existing documented planning process in place.  This can be rather ironic because often the projects are repeated or very similar projects are undertaken.  Templates and structure are missing so everyone just wings it, making it up as they go along, re-inventing the wheel. The goals of the project are often vague.  This is a lack of direction from the top leadership to those tasked with doing the work.  The project leader has to push back and manage upwards, seeking clear reasons for the WHY of the project and then make sure everyone involved in the team understands the WHY. Project scope creep is like a cancer that can kill the project, denying it success.  The project begins with vague boundaries around what is to be done.  In quick order, either external parties or the team themselves, become like Emus and are attracted by bright shiny objects.  Very quickly the additional tasks multiply but the time frame and the resources committed to the project do not change.  This never ends well. The implementation strategy regarding roles, budgets, timelines and follow-up is weak or non-existent.  Well, when you are having fun and winging it, you are super busy getting on with the actual work, so no strategy needed.  Later things go wrong because timelines were not clear nor properly planned.  The resources do not turn up at the required timing or the sequencing of the work is found to be skewwhiff, so there are delays you cannot easily cover or resolve. You quickly find that people, rather than logistics, are the trickiest part of project leadership.  All the coolest project management software and sophisticated systems in the world won't save you from people problems. You may not have been able to match the project team resource with the skill sets required and you have to make do with what you have.  There may be incompatible working styles in the team and you are now also chief psychologist, in addition to team project leader, spending a lot of time and energy dealing with staff or division conflicts.  

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 word or any number of other methods to quiet the mind. They are seeking to get more clarity about themselves and what are their real priorities.  As presenters, this is a good metaphor for when we are in front of people speaking.  You would think with all those thousands of years of Zen in Japan, in art, in design, in temples, gardens, in history etc., that the Japanese people would be legends of simplicity and clarity when presenting.  Not true!  Presenting as an idea only came to Japan around 160 years ago.  Fukuzawa Yukichi who founded Keio University and who graces the 10,000 yen bank note, launched public speaking in Japan in the Meiji period.  There is still an enzetsukan or speech hall preserved on the grounds of Keio University, where presumably the first public speeches were given. Western society plumbs the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, parliaments allowing debate and Hollywood for models on speech giving.  Japan has no traditional home grown role model. If the authorities needed you to know anything in old japan, a notice board would have it written there for you.  No shogunal oratory from the castle walls to the assembled masses.  No Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches before vanquishing the foe in battle.  Japan bypassed all of that until Fukuzawa Yukichi decided this was another area of modernization that needed implementation in Japan, like wearing ties, boots, hats and petticoats.   Of course there were no slide decks in those days, but Japan certainly was an early adopter of the technology for giving presentations – the overhead projector, the slide projector, the modern light weight projector, large screen monitors, electronic pointers, etc.  Any venue you go to in Japan will be bristling with cool tech gear. Interestingly, the content on the speaker's screen will also be bristling.  There will be 10 graphs on the one page, lurid diagrams employing 6 or more vivid colours, numerous lines of text so small you could use it for an optometrist's eyesight test chart.  Where has the zen gone? To be an effective presenter, we don't need any tech or screens or props or gizmos.  We can just speak to the audience and enjoy being the full focus of their attention.  As a result of this visual conflagration, many speakers are competing for attention with what is being displayed on the screen.  Company representatives love to play the video of their firm or product or service.  They can be quite slick, the joy of the marketing department. They are the pit into which a chunk of money was thrown for the production company, directors, designers, film and sound crew, talents and innumerable others who all got a slice of the pie. The question to ask though is does this video actually assist the speaker to make the key point under consideration.  Often they are like eye candy, but are not on point to the main argument.  Unless it strongly reinforces your message dump it.  It will only be competition for you the speaker and it will suck up valuable time which could be spent better with you as the main focus.  I saw Ken Done, a well known Australian artist, give a talk in Japan many years ago.  He has a very unique visual painting style. He moved around from behind the lectern, stood next to it and just spoke about his art to the audience.  It was very engaging because it was so intimate.  The Japanese audience loved it.  There was only one source of stimulation for the audience and that was Ken Done.  This is what we want – to be the center of our audience's world for the next thirty or forty minutes. Don't use a slide deck unless there is something in that content and presentation on screen which really helps bring home your argument.  If it is for information purposes, then that will work well.  If you are there to persuade, then you will be so much more powerful if all the attention is concentrated on one point and that point needs to be you. In this case we have stripped away all the visual noise, so we have to fill the void with word pictures.  We need to transport the audience to a place where they can see what we are talking about, in their mind's eye.  If you have ever read the novel after seeing the movie, you find yourself transported visually to the scenes from the movie, as you read the novel's pages.  This is the same idea. We have to usher the audience to a place, time and situation that we are describing in words, in such a way that visually they can imagine it. We don't always have to have slides or visuals.  We are the message, so let's manufacture the situation so that we are the center piece of the proceedings and all eyes and ears are on us, totally focused on every word we say.  We need to Zen our way to speaking and presenting success!

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 is that we don't actually do it.  We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails,  without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved.  We see this tendency all the time.  Any group of people given a project task go straight into the gruesome detail.  In project planning, a pinch of planning goes an extremely long way. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein. Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations. Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope.  This often changes mid-steam so we need to be nimble and adjust accordingly. Know the customer's requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed. Plan well. The plan will cover the scope, schedule, cost, approach etc.  Involve task owners to gain buy-in and apply a strong reality check to what you have created.  Strangely, the planning value comes from the creation process and not just the project outcome.  It forces some hard thinking, tough prioritisations, player commitments, clear controls, smooth coordination and cooperation.  Basically, the things at which most companies are usually rubbish. Build a great team with strong ownership. Motivation of the team is critical, so we need total clarity around the WHY, trust, communication, sufficient resources and mutually agreed deadlines. Track progress. Frequent reviews, wide visibility, broad communication and clear goals are needed.  There are hard and soft aspects to most projects, so ensure we don't overlook the soft skills needed to succeed. Use baseline controls. These are the fundamental building blocks against which we steer the project forward and against which we alter course when needed. Write it, share it, save it. Here is the Holy Grail of project management – write it down - if it isn't written down it doesn't exist. Document procedures, plans, evolving designs.  Baseline controls are compared against the preserved records.  Repeatable projects especially need this record, to which are added the fresh set of insights and learnings of the current project. Test it. Jumping into new territories with both feet can be high risk.  Better to develop test cases early to help with understanding and verification of what is required to succeed.  Resources and time are the most often underestimated elements, so an early testing helps to flush out the gaps. Ensure customer satisfaction. Make the customer's real needs the prism through which everything is viewed.  Undetected changes in customer requirements or not focusing on the customer's business needs can in fact blow up in our face. Be pro-active. Be proactive in applying these principles and in identifying and solving problems as they arise. Review and search for problems, knowing there are people dedicated to hiding issues.  Vigilance is a virtue we all need to practice when working on projects, especially anticipating trouble before it arises or becomes too explosive.  Stop the same old, same old and take a fresh look at your methodology for approaching projects.  It seems so simple, but it can simply go wrong so easily. You might be surprised at how loose and inefficient your current methodology is.  We can always do better and these ten rules will help us on that journey.  

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 seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude.  Good service, consistently delivered, is no accident and so it has to be made to occur.  How can we do that? Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service.  He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book “Moments Of Truth”.  Carlson's insights flooded back to me when I checked into a hotel in Singapore.  By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singaporean Government, who spend millions every year to develop and maintain their landscaped, leafy, green, tropical thoroughfares.  This is smart.  You are already in a pleasant mood just getting into town.  While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice.  Singapore is very humid and trust me, after a long flight, that ice cold beverage went down very well.  I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel. One of Carlzon's observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery.  For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answering your call in a pleasant, helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand.  The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy, disinterested and unfriendly. Instantly,  your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer.  How do you feel when you are given the run around from department to department? So back to my story.  As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn't working.  After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on.  There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room.  Actually, I discovered the same system in the elevator, when I unsuccessfully tried to select my floor.  Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant, busy young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two salient facts to me.  Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand. Let me mention a customer service breakdown I particularly dislike here in Japan.  When you call just about any organization here, you get a very flat voice answering the phone saying in Japanese ,“XYZ company here”.  You ask to speak with that very excellent and impressive member of staff, Ms. Suzuki whom you met recently. The flat uninterested voice tells you that she “is not at her desk right now” and then you are abandoned to stone cold motherless silence.  The “may I take down your name and phone number so that she can call you back” bit is rarely offered.   Instead, you are left hanging on the phone. The inference of the silence is that if Ms. Suzuki is not around, that is your problem buddy and you should call back later, rather than expect a return call.  Again, to Carlzon's point, these inconsistencies of customer service directly damage the brand.  In this example, when I had previously met Ms. Suzuki, I was impressed by her and consequently I had a good impression of the whole organisation.  I was projecting that positive vibe to the entire company. The person taking the call has just put that positive image of the brand to the sword. When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service.  You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department's efforts to create an excellent image of the organization.  After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven't  you? But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand?  Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn't get properly briefed.  I heard one of my recent hires in the sales team answering the phone with an unhelpful tone in his voice.  He actually sounded like he was angry.  He was in his fifties, so no boy, but obviously that had been his standard, ugly phone manner throughout his entire working life.  A perpetual brand killer, client alienating, reputation destroyer right there.  We have an open plan office, so I could hear this. If you are encased in the dark wood paneled corner executive crib with a tremendous view, then maybe you will never know what is going on in the engine room and therefore be unable to do anything about it. Leaders, we should all sit down and draw the spider's web of how customers interact with us and who they interact with.  We should expect that nobody on our team gets it about the preservation of the brand and determine that we have to tell them all again, again and again.  So how about this for a starter for educating our staff to do a better job protecting and enhancing the brand: Answer the phone with a pleasant, happy voice. Be helpful and offer your name first, so the customer won't be embarrassed that they didn't recognise your voice.  It also gives the caller confidence that a real person is going to take care of their needs. If you take the call and the person they are calling isn't there, proactively offer to ensure they get a call back as soon as possible and guarantee you will get their message through to them. End with thanking them for their call and again leave your name, in case there is anything further the caller may need. First impressions count, but so do all the follow-up impressions, if we want to build a sustainable, consistent positive image with our customers.  Consistency of good experiences doesn't happen automatically.  We have to look again at all of our touch points with our customers and ensure that everyone in the team understands their place in maintaining the excellent brand we have built up. Action Steps Draw your spiders web of client touch points and identify who needs training, including non-regular staff. Design the experience you want the client to have and train everyone around the content. Look at your systems for moving or transitioning the client through the organization, to make sure the client experience is consistently good. Always check to see what you think is happening is actually the case.  

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 The dojo is the ultimate equalizer.  Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks's mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else.  You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, society status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities. In business, we forget this primary lesson and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities.  We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people's real abilities are recognized and rewarded. Starting The class begins with a short meditation interval.  This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what is to come.  Next everyone is bowing toward the front.  The front of the class represents all who came before us.  We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization.  By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going.  Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion.  Finally, we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travelers on a journey of self-discovery. How do we start the work day?  Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there.  In our office we review one of the Dale Carnegie Principles each day.  We then share our scheduled meetings, our highest goals for the day, end with a motivational quote and a final rousing call to all do our best (ganbarimashoo!). Stretching We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at the highest possible levels of performance.  If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice and coaching or are you just practicising on the client? Basics We repeat the same drills over and over, every class, every year, forever.  We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution.  We are aiming for absolute efficiency and economy of movement.  We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought.   A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity?  Sparring There are two formats.  Prearranged sparring dictates what is coming and the order in which it comes.  Free sparring is one hundred percent spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of ploy and counter ploy.  At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in under one minute, but using our physical techniques with total body commitment. When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker?  Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes?  Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains and  speed over their brawn? Kata These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents.  The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection.  The form is set and so we can release the mind into a Zen state enabling us to go beyond the form.  Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected?  Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness?  Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation?  Strengthening and warming down Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance.  We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles. Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace?  Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people?  Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested. Finish We repeat the bowing and this time we add our Values.  We voice carefully chosen words which represent the value system of our dojo, (Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect).  These are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our normal routines. How do we end the workday?  Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow?  Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better?  The system of the martial arts hasn't changed all that much over the many centuries and for a very simple reason.  It works.  How about your company?  Are you perfecting your systems for the ages?  

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 don't offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”.  If you don't know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back.  They never will.   No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won't share their name.  They don't want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won't put you through.  The boss is a salaried employee and they won't take calls from people they have never heard of.  They don't think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”.  They think, “I don't want to have to deal with people I don't know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”.  Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different.  It has worked for thousands of years here. So how do we break through the steel barrier.  Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name.  The last day of  the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one.  Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th)  are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc. If we want to call a company and we don't know the person's name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day.  This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up. Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery.  Companies don't understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained.  They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns. I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them.  I didn't know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point.  I could never get past the gatekeeper.  She would always tell me he wasn't available and that he would call me back. That never happened.  I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets.  You would expect he would want to talk with me.  No such luck.  In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff.  I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country. Here are some ideas. Even if you don't know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them.    That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don't know who you are.  This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through.  Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm.  The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am.  They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch.  This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there.  Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there.  Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person's name. Your chances of connecting will go up. If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had.  Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them.  Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them.  More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business connection established and are more likely to put you through. Why don't they ever call you back?  They recognize you are trying to sell them something and that means making a change in the supply arrangements.  Change triggers a lot of requirement for internal harmonisation of a new supplier choice. They have to get the hanko seals stamped on the submission they will have to circulate to all those effected by the new decision.  It will also probably require individual meetings with certain key people to secure agreement.  It is a lot less work, trouble, time loss and risk to just ignore you in the first place.  Yes, you can get through but it is not easy. You need to try some tactics to make it possible.  Have these issues in mind before you reach for the phone.  This will save you a lot of frustration and lost time.

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.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field.  He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years. The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow.  It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent.  Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company.  Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space.  Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable.  Apart from that quibble though, they were well done.  I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material.  I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time.  Where was he looking?  He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and behind him at the monitor he was using to show the slides.  In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form TV monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time.  They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee.  He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at it the whole time. Mercifully, he wasn't reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter.  He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience.  Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles. He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject.  Unfortunately, he preferred to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety.  I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher around shoulder height, so they would be more visible. He didn't seem to be lacking in confidence.  I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn't come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.  What was going on here? I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge.  He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience.  He didn't seem to understand that in order to convince an audience of your point of view, you need to engage them.  Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day.  He must have imagined that his personal part in the process was not relevant.  Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him.  He just continued to stare at the screen. By the way, the words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at. The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal.  Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader.  We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language.    Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds.  Longer than that it becomes too intrusive.  Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person.  Don't do it in any predictable order, because people will anticipate what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet.  Rather divide the room up into six sections.  Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room.  Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject. Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm.  He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit.  The quality of your content may be the best on the planet, but that does not remove your role in explaining it.  Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.

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 the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics.  The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team.  The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed.  The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients.  The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time.  Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse.  Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate.  Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives.  "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses.  If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state. We are not delegating enough.  We know we should do more of it but we don't.  We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload.  In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat.  After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves.  Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do?    Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds.  We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do.  The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift.  We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished.  Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau.  We never get to any perfect harmony with our team.  The ones we want to keep, move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default.  The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again.  This kills progress.  The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode.  We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer.  Hiring gets harder and more expensive. None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon.  The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important.  The agile yet focused will win in this game.  A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness.  Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator.  We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion.   The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint.  We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going.  This sounds simple.  But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future?  Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward?  Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like.    “I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague.  What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction?  The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment.  Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done.  We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing.   We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds.  We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place.  The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide. So stop what we are doing.  Intervene in our busyness.  Re-connect with who we really are.  Reaffirm our direction.  Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.

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 roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don't want to do that.  We can't expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour.  The sale call roadmap starts even before the call.  These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can't turn up and ask basic questions about the company.  We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them. Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start.  We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects.  When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors.  I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank.  He was an absolute master at this.  He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing.  We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew.  He did this to break the ice and establish rapport.  I never did get to brief him on my division! This rapport building is important with clients.  We know if we don't get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us.  Even if we don't have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them.  We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them.  In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention.    We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering.  In other words, all the firm's dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers?  Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this.  They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to.  Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs.   Now buyers sometimes don't want to tell us their precise situation.  We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance.  We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have.  If they don't have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale.  We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves.  Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don't need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don't deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution.  Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company.   We can't leave it there though, because that is still too abstract.  We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results.  This is where word pictures are very powerful.  In most cases, we are selling a future that they can't fully appreciate.  So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share. If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too.  The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies.  Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them.  We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, “How does that sound”.  We want to flush out any resistance to place an order.  If they don't have any problems, then we just ask for the order, “Shall we go ahead?”. If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are?  They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule.  It doesn't matter what they mention, we shouldn't answer it immediately.  I know the emotional temptation is strong to jump in and correct their misunderstanding or their resistance but wait. Remember, we are only getting the headline, at this point and we need more information before we are in a position to answer their objection.  Once we have heard the details of what they are thinking, we still wait, we don't answer it.  We keep digging.  There may be other even more pressing concerns they haven't mentioned yet and there is no point in answering a minor concern, if the big one is left unattended. Once we have gotten out their key concerns, we ask them about which one is the highest priority for them. And then we proceed to answer that item.  Often once we have answered that one, the other concerns fade away.   Finally we ask for the order. They may say they have to think about it and because of the consensus decision making system in Japan, they actually have to get the rest of the organisation behind this yes.  That is fine but make an appointment right then and there for a follow up meeting to put a firm schedule behind getting that consensus.  If you don't, then it could drag on forever. You are better to push for a finite yes or no.  Thinking you have something in your pipeline, when you don't is false comfort.  A clear no is better because then you have a better picture of deal flow and revenue projections. You can devote your full energy on another buyer who can say yes and go ahead.  If we get a yes, next we do the follow up and deliver on what we promised. This roadmap is how we run the sales meeting with the client as opposed to Japan where, typically, the buyer hijacks the process and usually runs the meeting.  We need to keep control and bring the buyer back to the roadmap to move along the rails or we will never get a sale.  Winging it may be more exciting and appealing to your free spirit, but you won't make as many sales.  The path to the sale is clear and you have to keep it moving along that path, going through all the stages, to get to a yes.

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 been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring. Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before.  Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk.  Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.  What would a business audience find inspiring?  It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will.  Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one's circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard.  The problem is business people's activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean  crossing exploits.  These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview.  The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope.  This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds.  When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too.  It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper.  We are magnets to lessons on survival.  We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.  You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull.  How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others?  Maybe you can't.  Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk.  I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason.  I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top.  Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information.  They are usually brief summaries of a person's life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both.  Don't just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories.  These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence.    There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm.  These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate.  Okay it wasn't you, but the audience doesn't care that much.  They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn't have to be your personal catastrophe.  Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use.   Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.  You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant.  This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world.  As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences.  When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate.  I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc.   I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful.  I just need the temerity to tell more of them. So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience.  The raw material is all around you.  Just start looking for it and begin compiling it.  When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ.  Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience.  Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages.  The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.

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. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background, in the inner sanctums of my mind. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), big drinker (every night) and a big gambler (every Saturday at the track). If you grew up in a gambler's household, then you know what never having any money is all about. The weekly pay packet received on Friday evening is taken down to the racetrack and blown on Saturday morning. I never gamble, I never smoke and I drink very, very moderately. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) it is called in Japanese – my Dad was my teacher by negative example. So as a gambler's son, you start below the waterline and have to work hard to break the surface and make something of yourself and eventually you do. The strange part is that the fear of poverty, the fear of failing never leaves you.  Somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that success is not allowed for you. So you drive yourself hard, constantly dissatisfied with your progress. It is never big enough, never good enough, never fast enough, never safe enough.  I could never answer the question of how much was enough, so I just tried to maximize it every time, in every way, in every situation.  This put enormous stress and pressure on myself. Then one day, something happens or someone says something, that makes you rock back on your heels and think hard about it. That is what happened to me. I was describing my fears of the cardboard box and my listener questioned that thesis.  He said, "Greg, you have a Ph.D., you have a big job with lot's of responsibility, you have money, you have assets and investments, you have drive and energy, so why are you operating on a false premise of failure. Why can't you drive forward based on a different idea?  What about the concept that you can live out of your potential, rather than your fear of failure?". Wow. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was stopped in my tracks by that comment. That thought of living out of my potential had never occupied my mind, not for even one nanosecond. Getting good information and doing something about it are not the same thing.  I was gripped by what he said and started to ask myself whether that was actually feasible. After so many decades of living out of fear of failure, could I just switch gears completely? Well it turns out that I could.  From that moment in 2000, I forgot about a cardboard box bound future. I made the switch by starting to concentrate on what I had going for me and looked for ways to make more of that.  Find out more when we come back from the break I made a list of all the things I thought were my strengths and I added that list to my goal setting routine, for daily review.  I concentrated on the positive, not the negative. It sounds simple to say that, but this is not simple, when your whole lifetime narrative has been one of probable failed future prospects. I changed my perspective about myself.  I started by questioning my basic assumption -  why I thought I would eventually fail?  What was the evidence for that assumption?  Was I still caught up in my father's paradigm of self perpetuating poverty, as part of the gambler's curse.  He was a hard worker.  He started work at 13 out in the bush on a sheep station in the west of Queensland.  He tried many things, but he could never get ahead because of the gambling.  When I analysed it, what had any of his life challenges to do with me?    I said to myself, “Hey, I don't gamble – ever”.  My real narrative should be different to my Dad's and it should be about who I am, not who my father was.  When I put it like this it sounds so obvious but it took me a long time to work that out.  I was trapped in a mindset of possible total failure looming in the future. For other fellow "fear of failure" travellers out there, hear me now - we can change gears.  We can live everyday with drive and hard work based on a new premise. There is such a thing as working toward our potential, rather than trying to escape from our fear of failure. We can change our view of who we are and where we are going.  We can objectively analyse our current and future prospects.  We can prepare for the future without worrying about it.  We can take steps to head off any possible calamities and take action now, rather than just spinning around in worry circles. Don't be like me though and spend lost decades working this out. Don't rely on getting lucky through the most random chance of a single comment. Hear me now and hit the reset button.  Decide you want to say goodbye to your cardboard box premonition or whatever fear is driving you and move to a better future based on the reality of your current strengths, experience and accomplishments.