The Presentations Japan Series Por arte de portada

The Presentations Japan Series

De: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Resumen

  • Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
    Copyright 2022
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Episodios
  • 393 Senior Executives Common Presentation Errors In Japan

    393 Senior Executives Common Presentation Errors In Japan
    Jul 8 2024
    It is not often that we get a front row seat to watch a group of very senior businesspeople compete with each other when presenting. If you like blood sports, then this is right up your alley. This is a zero-sum game for seizing the brass ring and even better, it is conducted in the full glare of the assembled masses. This is an annual event, which, as a Master Trainer of presentations and public speaking, I always look forward to. Being the eternal optimist, I always imagine that this year I will be delighted with the high levels of professionalism on display. This could be a leading indicator that the senior ranks of companies are understanding the importance of presentations, persuasion and storytelling skills. We all know the pressures in business and the levels of competition are getting more and more intense. Throw in the rapid advances of technology and we have a boiling red ocean of difficulty, which we all must deal with. These executives are always a good gauge of the ability of business to keep up with the demands. Sadly, another year of no change and no improvement. These executives have two minutes to convince the voting members that they should be selected over their rivals. On this occasion, there were no women in the mix, which in itself is a worry, but that is another podcast. Every year I take detailed notes on what I am seeing and not seeing. Typically, no one seems to have a clue about what to do with their hands. More importantly, they have no idea how to make their hands work for them. Gestures add strength to our words and are a powerful amplifier of our message. Holding our hands around stomach or groin level or even worse, behind our backs, eliminates the opportunity to use this powerful message driving medium. Gestures need to be held up high, so that they are easy to see. The maximum holding time is up to fifteen seconds, after which the gestures lose all their power and just become annoying. Pointing fingers or fists at the audience are very aggressive gestures and are best replaced with using the open palm instead. The desired effect is the same without the aggro. Eye contact is another major lost opportunity. In a one-minute period, we can engage directly with ten people and we should be doing that all the time we have available to us. The alternative is what these executives were doing, which was not looking at the audience and just vaguely scanning the room, not focusing on anyone in particular. A type of fake eye contact effort. It was a large venue with hundreds of people and so optically, when we select one person down the back to focus on, the ten people sitting around them all feel we are looking directly at them too. We can get ripple effect going with our eye contact and in one minute engage with eleven people. This wasn’t happening. The result was the speakers seemed detached and not engaged with their voters. This makes the message more difficult to drive in because the power of the eye contact is completely diffused and rendered useless. Voice strength is important too. One of the aspirants asked me for a few hints about five minutes before he was due to start speaking. I know him well. He has a very demure manner and is rather softly spoken. I told him to simply increase his vocal power. He may have feared that he would be screaming, but I assured him that would not be the case at all. I knew that this would help him to come across as more credible and confident. He did that and turned out to be the highest vote getter. A few of the speakers let their voice trail off at the very end of their talk, when doing the wrap up. This is extremely bad and leaves a weak final impression. Don’t let it fade out. Instead make it a crescendo at the end and finish with strength. Another surprising thing was how little the speakers understood about how to use a microphone. There was a microphone stand for them to use and almost all of them stood too far back away from the microphone. They were losing vocal power as a result and this diminished their dynamism in the eyes of the audience. One of them added to his woes by getting his feet positioning wrong. If you point your feet at ninety degrees to the audience, you are balanced and will be able to focus on the entire audience. If, like him, you get the angle wrong and are off fifteen degrees, without knowing it, your body positioning is now turned such that you are ignoring about a third of your audience on one side. Don’t ignore your audience. To my horror and astonishment, one company President of a very large and well-known firm, chose to read his entire speech from hand held notes. This is a two-minute speech and he can’t manage that at his level? I was thinking that is a pretty sad state of affairs at his age and stage. There is absolutely no need for that. If you do, it ensures you look down at the page and do not engage your ...
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    13 m
  • 392 Presenters Need Strong Discipline In Japan

    392 Presenters Need Strong Discipline In Japan
    Jul 1 2024
    Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries. This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study. A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed. Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it. I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way. The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it? I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation. Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned. She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan. Early in, she said something disturbing. She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk. This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately. Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control. Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time. Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long. I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others. When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more. The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish. There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material. This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand. In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second. People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated. I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop. The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience. Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to. I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants. As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan. Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings. This is really bad. Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for. Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy. My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule. She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up. Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career. It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies. She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods. This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you. Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum. She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience. No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary. Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry ...
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    12 m
  • 391 The Japanese “Way” of Presenting

    391 The Japanese “Way” of Presenting
    Jun 24 2024
    Foreign companies often want to appoint a Japanese person to be the head of their Japan operation. This is done on the basis that they will know what is best for the business. This proclivity has made many washed up, tremendously mediocre Japanese Presidents a lot of money and substantially extended their careers. At some point the shareholders, or the Board, start to ask why there are no results in the Japan operation. The local chief usually manages to fend off these “rude” enquiries for a few years until the jig is up. In comes the shiny new President from headquarters who has been despatched to “fix” the Japan operation and turn it around. This typically leads to another array of problems, but that is another podcast. The idea is that the Japanese way of doing things is the best for Japan – “when in Tokyo do it the Tokyo way” kind of thing. I remember trying to sell our High Impact Presentations Course to a foreign financial firm. The Japanese lady I was speaking with told me she wanted the “Japanese way” of presentations instead of the Dale Carnegie global best practice way. It is an interesting question, isn’t it. How far do we go to accommodate the Japanese culture and way of doing things, while still getting the maximum benefit from doing things at the highest possible level? We do meet foreigners here who have been here for a long time and have quietly gone troppo. They are trying so hard to assimilate they are out Japanesing the Japanese. What should we do about how we present in business? Should we go troppo too and do it the Japanese “way”? What is the Japanese “way”? Here is your handy dandy guide to going troppo when presenting in Japan and how to blend in with the locals. 1. Monotone Speak in a complete monotone voice and forget about using any voice modulation, pauses or hitting of keywords and phrases. Some people will say this is just how it is because the Japanese language is a monotone language and so there is no chance for vocal variation, as we have with foreign languages. That is almost true, except even Japanese speakers can use two mighty levers to elevate their presenting world. Speed and strength will produce the variety needed. Slowing words down for emphasis or speeding them up both work well. Taking the strength down to speak in a conspiratorial whisper is good and so is using power to hit keywords. 2. Be Seated Invariably, when I am invited to speak in Japanese the layout will feature a desk with my name written on paper either draping over the desk or sitting upright on a paper tent. The microphone will be on a low stand. This is to make it clear that I am humble and I am not standing above the audience, making myself out to be better than everyone else. It also means I lose my access to my body language and most of my gestures. 3. No Eye Contact Looking a superior in the eye in samurai times would get your head cut off for insolence. The culture ensures that we don’t make direct eye contact with people when we speak and so Japanese presenters have migrated this into their presentations. They never look into the eyes of their audience members. It also means that they haven’t realised that normal conversation and giving presentations are two different things and different rules can apply. The engagement of the audience members through six seconds of individual eye contact are foregone in order to keep your head on your shoulders. 4. Weak Voice Speaking softly is a cultural preference and so why not keep that going when presenting? The speaker is under-powering their presentation, so often, it is hard to hear what they are saying and there is certainly no passion involved as demonstrated through voice projection. This guarantees the speaker has almost zero presence in the room. 5. Few Gestures Holding the hands in front of the groin, behind the back or together at waist level are all favourites. Each position locks up the hands and cancels out using any gestures to emphasise the message being delivered. 6. Casual Posture Having the weight displacement 70/30 is common and usually it results in one hip being kicked out to the side. Swaying around is also popular as they speak. These are all distractions from the message, but no one is conscious of that, so they keep doing it. 7. One packed slide Cramming everything on to one slide, with five tiny different fonts and six colours, is definitely a typical effort by Japanese presenters. The rule that we have to be able to understand the point of the message on the slide in two seconds has been tossed overboard in favour of a full noisy baroque effort. Good luck with out Japanesing the Japanese when it comes to the Japanese “way” of presenting.
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    12 m
Gestión Economía
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