The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By cover art

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • For succeeding in business in Japan you need to know how to lead, sell and persuade. This is what we cover in the show. No matter what the issue you will get hints, information, experience and insights into securing the necessary solutions required. Everything in the show is based on real world perspectives, with a strong emphasis on offering practical steps you can take to succeed.
    copyright 2022
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Episodes
  • What The Pro Public Speakers Do

    What The Pro Public Speakers Do
    May 19 2024
    When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored. There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well. It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice. This is where the majority of lousy, boring and uninspiring speakers trip up. They don’t rehearse or practice. Instead, they just unload on their poor unsuspecting audience. Here is a pro hint. Never practice on your audience! The global CEO of a major pharma company jetted into town recently and spoke at a chamber of commerce event. The presentation was well structured and flowed in a way that was easy to follow. The slides were professional and clear. He spoke fluently, wasn’t reading from any script and instead was talking about the key points up on screen. When we got to Q&A, he repeated the question, so that everyone could hear it and then answered it. He did that while addressing the entire audience, rather than just speaking to the inquirer. When he did not have the information referred to in a question, he admitted it straight up, without trying to fudge it. This is not an admission of weakness, rather it builds trust and credibility. I doubt he did any rehearsal for that audience, because it was a stump speech he has given so many times he was entirely comfortable with the content. Could he have done better? Yes, he could have added more stories into the presentation. A few vignettes from the exciting world of white lab coats, where they were developing new medicines to save humanity, would have been good. He could have delivered it with a bit more passion. It was professional, but it came across as a stump speech. He was supremely comfortable delivering it and that is one issue we have to be alert to. When we are too comfortable, we can sometimes slip ourselves into cruise control mode. We should keep upping the ante each occasion, to try and see how much further we can push ourselves as presenters. Another function I attended was an industry awards event and the main VIP guest made some remarks before announcing the winners. Humour is very, very hard to get right. For every professional comedian we see on television, there are thousands waiting tables and trying to break into the industry. When you see humour done well by a public speaker, you are impressed. You need to have material that is funny for a start. Then you have to be able to deliver it so that people laugh. This sounds easy, but as professional comedians know, the timing of the delivery is key. So are the pauses and the weighting of certain key words. It has to be delivered fluently, so no ums and ahs, no hesitations, no mangling of words. Getting the facial expressions to match what is being said is also tricky. Our humorous VIP was delivering some lines that he had used a number of times before, so he knew his material worked. It is always good when big shots are self depreciating. We can more easily identify with them, when they don’t come across as taking themselves too seriously. “I am good and I know it”, doesn't work so well with the rest of us. How do you become humorous as a speaker? Where do we acquire our humorous material? We steal it. Our speaker had probably heard those jokes somewhere else and just topped and tailed them for this event. Very cleverly, he made them sound personal, as if these incidents had really happened to him. This is important in order to build a connection with the punters in the audience. So when you attend an event and you hear someone make a good joke or tell a humorous story, don't just laugh and reach for another Chardonnay, quickly write it down and later start using it yourself. The secret though is to practice that humorous telling on small audiences to test you have the delivery just right. The cadence is important and that takes practice. I would guess our speaker had told those jokes many times before. It is fresh for us, but for him, it was well within his range of capability. This is what comedians do. They introduce new material in small venues, filter out what doesn't work, and then they bring it to the big audience on the big stage with the best gags. We should do the same. Another place where we can find humor is in what we say that makes an audience laugh. When I was returning to Japan in nineteen ninety two as a diplomat and as a trade commissioner, I was called upon to do a lot of public speaking in Japanese. I began with constructing jokes in Japanese that I thought were humorous. This was a pretty bold step, because I had no track record in being funny in English, let alone in Japanese. These jokes of my own crafting all bombed completely. However, I would say something not meaning to be funny and the Japanese audience would laugh. I ...
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    14 mins
  • How To Defeat Imposter Syndrome As A Presenter

    How To Defeat Imposter Syndrome As A Presenter
    May 12 2024
    We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain. The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project. These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them. We should be clear and concise, but we probably don’t really get out of first gear as a presenter. Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report. We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher. This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt. This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject? What if they have questions I can’t answer? What if they don’t like it or me? What if I underperform as a presenter? What if I white out and forget what I want to say? The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic. How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job? It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little. We don’t have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday. What does competent look like? It means we are well prepared. This doesn’t mean we have fifty slides in the slide deck ready to rumble. It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk. It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the “chapters” that will bring home that point we have selected. We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom. It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated. We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us. They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information. The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don’t have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels. It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen. We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience. We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face. This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry. We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk. We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret. We definitely don’t show any of these to our audience. We are fully committed to the idea that the “show must go on”, no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time. Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points. We then move on to the next person and keep repeating this as we build a one-to-one feeling with members of our audience. They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is powerful. We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses. This helps to drive home the key points we want to make. We are purposely asking rhetorical questions to keep everyone engaged. In terms of pure volume, we are speaking about 40% louder than normal. This projects our voice for clarity and at the same time our confidence. Audiences buy speaker confidence and we are keeping ourselves busy selling it to them. We are using our first close we developed as we go into Q & A and we are confidently prepared for their questions. We are confident because we have built up reserve power through our study of the subject. We have kicked off Q & A, by publicly stating how many minutes we have for ...
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    15 mins
  • Create Raving Fans When Presenting In Japan

    Create Raving Fans When Presenting In Japan
    May 5 2024
    We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience. What makes the difference? The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner. Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life. We see this with music. The same lyrics, but with a different arrangement and something magical happens. This new version becomes a smash hit. Speeches are similar. A boring rendition is given a delivery make over and suddenly has the audience sitting on the edge of their seats fully enthralled. I am sure we would all vote for the enthralling version, so how to do we do that? The quality of the argument we are going to present is important. We definitely need to design two powerful closes, one for the end of the speech and an extra one for after the Q&A. It sounds counterintuitive, but we should start from the close when designing the talk. We work hard to clearly define what is the most compelling message we want to leave with our audience. Only then do we start to work backwards, structuring the rest of the speech from that point. Once we know what will really resonate with the audience, we begin gathering evidence to back that assertion up. We have to remember that broad statements are too easy to make. This is the Era of Cynicism, “fake news”, so the listener will need a lot of convincing. We now do a rough sketch of the key points and attach the supporting evidence. In a thirty minute speech, there won’t be so much time, so we might get through three or four of these key points and that is it. We must make sure that the evidence is super, super strong. We need really compelling proof, in order to build solid credibility for our argument. The next stage is vital, especially in this Age of Distraction. We have to wrangle a dynamite blockbuster opening. We have to compete with all the things running through the minds of our audience. The things they were doing before they got to the venue and all the things they have to do after this speech. The hand held device is a modern day siren call. It so silkily diverts their attention away from us, as they check email and social media. We have to smash through all that obstruction. We sweep all before us and clear a path so that the audience will actually hear our message. The first words out of our mouth had better be super compelling. If not, we will lose the battle for people’s modern miniscule attention spans. We need to carefully design what that will be, because it won’t happen by itself. We want our visuals on screen to be clear and instantly comprehendible within two seconds. It used to be ten seconds, but now we are down to just two, so really take a cold hard look at what you are putting up on screen. If it is taking the viewer longer than two seconds, then the slides are too dense. Let’s keep the colours to an absolute maximum of three. Photos are great with maybe just one word of text added or just kept as they are. This intrigues our audience to learn more. We can then talk to the point we want to make. If we use graphs, we should have only one per screen wherever possible. If we are going to use video, it had better be short and really, really hot. The transition from slide deck to video, back to slide deck must be seamless, so none of that tech fail we often see on display. Every five minutes we need to be switching the energy levels right up, to keep our audience going with us. This is key because they flag. Classical music has its lulls and crescendos and so should we. Naturally, we have tonal variety right throughout the talk, but we need to be hitting some key messages very hard, around that five minute interval. This should be synchronised with some powerful visuals on screen, to further drive home the point. This is not a result of chance, good fortune or fortuitous accident. We need to plan for this massive impact on the audience. We structure the presentation so that this brings all the vocal and visual elements together, in a powerful, distinct, one in a million way. We are meticulously sprinkling stories throughout the speech to highlight the evidence for our key points. Data by itself is fundamentally dull, but stories fleshing out the data, should be scintillating. These will be full of visual stimulation, using word pictures to conjure mental pictures in the minds of our audience. We bring physical locations to life, describe vivid colours, talk about the season, mix in people they may know and importantly, explain the why of the story. In this way we take our listeners on a magical journey, where they see the scene playing out in their own mind’s eye. It is a bit like reading a novel, after having seen the movie. As you read it, you can mentally imagine the scenes you saw previously on screen. This is exactly ...
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    15 mins
Management Economics
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