The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Employees As Number One   There is a great Simon Sinek video floating around about how companies say employees are important, but don’t really act like it. He lines up the typical CEO hit list of growth, shareholder value, customers and in fourth place, employees. He notes that even if you elevate customers to number one, employees still come in second in importance. Richard Branson is also a powerful advocate for putting employees first before all else. It makes sense. We want motivated, enthusiastic staff engaging with our customers and going the extra mile.   In many ways, Japan has long had a different order to Anglo-Saxon corporate philosophy. Workers first, then customers and shareholders last. Can we learn anything from Japan’s corporate traditions on how to put workers first?   This system worked fine in an environment of lifetime employment, low growth protected by interlocking shareholdings and price fixing through the dango or cartel system. The foreign ownership of Japanese company shares and the

Gaining Cooperation From Others    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

Three Critical Things Entrepreneurs Need   Usually, when we think about how to succeed in our own business, we favour things like sufficient cash flow and capital. This is absolutely true, but this is a product of decisions we have already taken. We need to focus on the core drivers of the company's success. There will be certain businesses where technology alone makes it work, but these are rare. For the rest of us to be successful, we need three critical skills: the ability to master our time, to clone ourselves and to be persuasive.   Time How we spend our time is the most high value resource we have. More than money, it makes or breaks our business. Poor time control leads to inefficiency, wasted efforts, stress and missed opportunities. Entrepreneurs are geniuses at trying to do too much. This means they are run ragged with time demands and no good solutions.   This has to be turned around and time gotten under firm control. Start with a simple audit of where you allocate your time now. Create a spreadsh

Real Freedom    Motivational quotes are everywhere and they remind us of useful things we already know, but have forgotten. Two recent messages struck me with their introspective power. Both are by recognised thought leaders. One was a distinguished academic, psychologist and philosopher. The other was a distinguished psychologist and holocaust survivor. Their conclusions are profound and achieved through different experiences and understandings of the human psyche.   William James (1842-1910) taught at Harvard and has been called “the father of American psychology”. He was a leader in the idea that we could control our lives through our mind. He said, “The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be”.   This was a breakthrough notion at that time. The prevailing idea had been that God’s will, chance or luck determined your life.   Victor Frankl (1905-1997) a concentration camp inmate, survived the holocaust

The 106 Centimeter Cold Caller   Salespeople are world class whiners. They are the most creative group amongst all professions for coming up with excuses about why they can’t meet their targets. The sale’s life requires a constant stream of new buyers. Marketing is permanently inhabited with ne'er-do-wells, who are sabotaging the sales department’s efforts with underdone campaigns and inept promotions. When the leads are few and far between, desperate measures are called for and the chief villain of the piece is cold calling. Everyone will assure you that you can’t cold call in Japan.   Salespeople everywhere are delicate blossoms. They get a rocket from their boss about their poor results and try to cold call potential clients over the phone. They get total, irreversible rejection and quit phoning after the third call. There is a variety of cold calling which is even more debilitating and that is tobikomi eigyo (飛び込み営業). You have probably seen some seriously stressed out younger person in your reception hall

Keep Your Shtick To Yourself Buddy     Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales. Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson. Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless. We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and partially interested, usually in a local retail format. The slick sales dude is what we see in movies or is a received image from urban myths. Hollywood pumps out Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street and we get sold an image of what high pressure salespeople look like.   Japan is fascinating, in that it throws up some doozies. Rotting blackened stumps for teeth, disheveled clothing, scuffed worn shoes, ancient food stains on ties – you encounter this low level of personal presentation here with salespeople. It is almost the opposite extreme of the American movie image.   Rat with a g

Stage Fright Got You?     Hands and legs quivering, knees knocking together, face turning red, pulse racing, mind whiting out – this is stage fright. The term is associated with the total melt down people experience when they get up on stage in front of an audience to speak. In Japan, there is even an association of stage fright people who wish to suffer no more. Our exposure to the “stage”, broadly defined, is any occasion where we are required to get up and speak in front of others. This frequency increases as we get older.   Our work responsibilities are rewarded with a salary but also the obligation to give reports or speeches. We are innocently beavering away at our jobs, are recognised for doing well and given promotions or more responsibility. This is when we are forced to move out of our area of defined expertise and out of our Comfort Zone.   Tetsuya Miyaki is a typical example. He was a low level bureaucrat in a municipal government office. Promoted to become the head of a department, he suddenly fo

Leaders: Get Off The Chems     Our cave dwelling ancestor past is still with us today. Rather than sabre tooth tigers though, we are reacting to anyone who argues with us or seeks to deny us what we want. The chemical cocktail in our bodies ignites passion, anger, mouth-before-brain outbursts, cursing, putdowns, sharp rebukes and killer comebacks. Fleet of foot, our reactions saved us from being lunch for predators but today that same nifty speed can get us into trouble with those around us.   Common sense is not common. Crystal clear communication goes unheard. The obvious is not obvious. There are no shortages of things in our leader world, which can set off a chemical chain reaction in us, that we can come to regret. The six-step devastation cycle plays out like this: Event, Interpretation, Emotional Response, Physical Response, Attitude Response and Effect. Event triggers can be mistakes; stupidity; something said, overheard or reported; interactions with others or a business crisis.   Our speed is astoun

Dream It   “We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do”. This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future. Up until the 1920s, fate and God’s will were the more common explanations for what would become of us. Psychology studies in the USA began to drive the idea that we could control our futures to a much greater degree than we thought, by controlling our thoughts. Not so remarkable today, but this was a brand new idea back then. The problem though is we still haven’t quite found the escape velocity to blast us out of our self-limiting beliefs about ourselves.   The decline in available well paying jobs following on from the Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 has had a broad impact around the globe. China’s ability to become the factory of the world, has meant that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the developed nations. Recent research is telling us that work

We Won’t Follow Bots     Basically your job is toast. There is a machine or there will soon be a machine that can do it faster, better and cheaper than you. Our skill set didn’t change much from the start of agriculture 12,000 years ago until the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century. This last 150 years has been busy. We have created a weapon that can destroy our race. Who thought we would be that stupid? Fifty years ago we didn’t believe machine translation of our complex language skills would get very far. Certainly it was expected that there would never be non-human intervention simultaneous translation. Also, fortunately, machines can’t pivot or anticipate (well except for IBM’s Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov in 1997).   Driving cars and trucks requires us, because it is such a delicate, detailed and difficult set of tasks. What a ridiculous idea to imagine replacing those cantankerous, aging Japanese taxi drivers and punch perm truckers here in Tokyo with a self-driving, self-navigating vehicl

Effective Project Management Rules   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. 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. 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,

REAL Leaders   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 REAL is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to combine evidence with pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on recent survey research we did in the USA We asked what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful. We are in the process of rolling this survey out globally. The REAL acronym 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. In the latter case, it means taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming other

Running A Foreign Business In Japan    Running your own business is challenging anywhere, but Japan adds a bit of spice to the broth. According to official statistics, 70% of Japanese companies are unprofitable. Business seems pretty simple at one level – constantly seek to increase revenues and reduce or hold down costs. To increase revenues you can find more customers, more repeater customers and raise prices.   Raising prices in Japan gets tough, when you are in the churning wash of decades of deflation and when there are always lots and lots of competitors. When the consumption tax was raised previously, the economy immediately plunged into recession, which indicates the price sensitivity of the populace. The Abe Cabinet blinked and gave up on the last scheduled increase out of fear of the consequences.   The usual way of differentiating yourself and justifying higher prices is through the added value you provide. Naturally, there is a major sales and marketing effort required to get that value message ou

Good Messages Delivered Badly     Seriously sad really. Our speaker had some excellent points to convey but due to silly basic errors, killed his organisation’s messages. I believe there is no excuse for this anymore. Today there is so much information available, so many role models, so much video instruction, so much access to insight, so much training, you really have to wonder how some organisations can do such a poor job.   The impressive thing was our speaker was delivering the talk in English, when that was not his native language. Actually, the level of English fluency was impressive. The speed was good, the pronunciation was fine, the speaking voice was clear. He came with a grand resume, part of the elite of the land, a well educated, senior guy. This was game, set and match to be a triumph of positive messaging and salesmanship. It was a fizzer.   I approached him after it was all over. Being the eternal Aussie optimist from the land of vast horizons, blue skies and wonderful sunshine, I thought our

Structured Project Planning     It sounds so obvious that we should have structures for doing our project planning. Projects are part and parcel of the fabric of work life and they constantly arise. It is surprising though that so many teams are busily working away with no structure whatsoever. The project team jumps straight into arranging the details of the project, without giving any thought to how the project should be approached in a holistic manner. Think about your own experience? Can you rattle off a structure for how projects should be planned, because you have always done it that way in the past? Probably not! I was the same. In one of my previous organisations, we actually completed a lot of projects and yet we never did anything apart from some very basic planning. We didn’t even think of them as projects – we just saw these activities as work.   So lets all get better organised. There are eight steps we can consider when we begin working on a project. Let’s assume that the team has been created,

Charismatic Leadership   Are you a perpetual student? I am always keen to learn and improve in my business, so I recently participated in a webinar on the subject of charisma in leadership. The set up for the webinar was impressive – the web landing page, the registration process, the videos, the automated follow–up emails. It was a Master Class in marketing and this part was worth it alone. The webinar itself was very good and the speaker was excellent. While listening, I was reflecting on charismatic leaders I have known and compared them to what I was hearing in the webinar.   There is an abundance of definitions on charismatic leadership. The definition proffered during the on-line session was uncontroversial and acceptable: emotional and intellectual engagement, inspiration to go the extra mile – all quite reasonable elements. Somehow though, they left me feeling vaguely unfulfilled.   Reflecting on charismatic leaders, what was it about them that made them so attractive? Of course they were highly skill

You Don’t Want Sales   Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib, “rat with a gold tooth” salespeople are the scourge of the earth. They are focused on your money and how quickly they can separate you from it. There are no barriers to entry or qualifications to enter this field of work. Riff raff need not apply but they do. Some will tell you anything, they live for today and like a shark, are constantly moving in order to feed. Snake oil purveyors to the naïve and trusting.   So, how do honest salespeople get anywhere when the image of the profession is so negative. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, people like Bernie Madoff, etc. - it goes on and on convincing us that we are permanently potential victims of scammers, charlatans and confidence men.   By the way, we are all in sales today. You might be in one of the “professions” but you are no longer above the fray. Lawyers are competing for clients just as voraciously as dentists, architects, engineers, doctors and everyone else who spent years

Hard Talk Fallacies   You have to tell people how it is or you will lose power and authority. If you swallow what you want to say, you will diminish yourself. If you avoid hard conversations, you will have less influence. You need to tell them exactly how you are feeling. This was the tenor of the advice coming from a communication “guru”. While listening to this, I thought this is absolutely going to fail in Japan, if not every where.   This guru is appealing to an American audience, so there is the temptation to just dismiss this as typical excess. There was however an earlier icon of communication skills named Dale Carnegie. An American from (show me, don’t tell me) Missouri, who started training (brusque and brash) New Yorkers in 1912. Despite being from the mid-West and teaching in the apocryphal rude capital of the universe, Dale Carnegie concluded that direct hard talk would fail. Both men appealing to the same audience, but approaching the subject from diametrically opposing stances.   Dale Carnegie’s

How To Be A Much Better Leader   “Born to lead” is nonsense. Many things shaped that person in order for them to achieve credibility with others. Of course, we can become a “leader” as part of our company designated hierarchy. We sit somewhere in an organizational chart above others, with various reporting lines elevating us above the hoi polloi. We know many people with that august title of “leader”, who we would never willingly follow in a million years – pompous, tiresome, incompetent jerks!   Can we become someone who others will follow when all the paraphernalia of leadership pomp and circumstance has been stripped away? At work the definition of a leader is fairly narrow: they manage processes and build people. There is leadership more broadly embraced outside of work – parent groups, hobbies, volunteer organisations. Often these non-work related positions become the sordid playgrounds of amateur politicians. People who cannot command respect at work, but who have the spare time and energy to manipulate

Ancien Regime Corporate Leaders   Sport is a popular source of inspiration for corporate leadership. Coaches attend off-sites and make good money telling executives how to be better motivators. Sports journalist Simon Kuper recently made an interesting observation in his column in the Financial Times about famous football coaches falling into decline, supplanted by younger, more innovative rivals. These superstar coaches were the original innovators, but they ran out of gas. Well not all of them. Almost as an aside, he flagged the difference between the shorter longevity of the “innovators” and those more hardy types who excelled at “people management”.   This is an interesting observation because often we surge through our careers based on our ideas, innovation or technical expertise. In Kuper’s article, the age of 40 was singled out. The planets start to align and leadership hopefuls begin their move to the very top. In my native Australia, historically, you were not thought to be a real man until you reach