The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Starting something new means we start with a clean slate and can create the culture we want to predominate throughout our organisation.  However how many people get that opportunity?  We are talking about a miniscule collection of opportunities here and it is much more likely we will be inheriting an existing culture, created over time by our predecessors.  That statement in itself may be problematic, because did they actually have a view on the type of culture they wanted or did it just evolve over time or in spite of them.    If we are inheriting an existing workplace culture, that doesn’t mean we cannot change it for the better. However, we should keep in mind that “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and we may be tempted to import the dominant headquarter culture to Japan.  Good luck with that and let me know how it is working out for you.  Actually don’t bother – I know the answer already.   What Are The Right Questions, Rather Than Right Answers   Our starting point is the most difficult.  Japan

How To Remember People’s Names at Networking and Business Events   Are you good at remembering the names of people you meet?  Are you having that embarrassing situation where you know the face, but the name isn’t coming to you?  How about that even worse situation where you have to introduce the person you cannot remember, to someone else?  We usually need the help of others in some form to achieve our visions. This can be people we already know or new acquaintances, for example, at a networking or business event.   But do you sometimes have this problem?   I meet so many people, I can’t remember them when I meet them again, or I meet people and two minutes later I’ve forgotten their name already.   How do you feel when you meet someone again, who remembers your name, but you can’t remember their name?  It’s awkward, embarrassing, and destroys my personal brand.    What can we do about this problem?  We want to be memorable to the people we meet in business, so we need to make sure they clearly hear our name

Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and master trainer in sales, presentations and leadership provides further insight into his extensive career in sales in Part Two of his interview with Andrew Hankinson.   “I love the fact that sales makes the wheels of commerce turn. Without sales, there’s no business…it’s such an important role” explains Dr. Story. Yet he points out many companies do not invest in their sales team. Realizing a need for training, in 1939 Dale Carnegie pioneered a series of public sales training courses with Percy Whiting. Dr. Story himself struggled starting as a salesperson at 16 years old selling Britannica encyclopedia door to door and reciting a 25-minute pitch. He claims: “it was only later when I got the training that I realized I could do this because before that I had no confidence.”   Dr. Story has released over 250 episodes of sales-focused podcasts titled The Japan Sales Series and has published two books, Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Business Mas

There is nothing like a good meltdown to throw up valuable lessons for the rest of us.  So, a big thank you Suga san, for helping us on our leadership journey.  His shock resignation finished off a year of disasters.  To be fair, he joins a long line of failed Japanese leaders.  Counterintuitively, the Liberal Democratic Party prefers to choose underperformers as their leaders. The backroom boys can more easily control what is really going on and the face to the nation is totally disposable, while the power brokers stay on, hidden in plain sight.  Nevertheless, he has made a sterling effort to bring about his own political demise.   Covid didn’t come wrapped in a roadmap out of the pandemic.  Every country has had to work it out as they go along and to be flexible to adapt to changing circumstances.  Japan is in trouble then immediately. Effective adaption techniques during disasters are yet to be evidenced in Japan.  The 1995 Kobe earthquake exposed a lot of leadership deficiencies in Japan.  In 2011, with t

In one of my other podcasts, “The Presentations Japan Series”, l talked about “Virtual Chatbots Are The End Of Civilisation”.  What is the problem and what do we bosses have to do to stop this happening inside our companies?  XiaoIce’s virtual chatbot accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions.  There are already 660 million users and it is designed to hook us by providing the levels of human interaction we cannot get in real life.  Danit Gal, an expert in AI ethics at Cambridge University says, “Users ‘trick’ themselves into thinking their emotions are being reciprocated by systems that are incapable of feelings”.  This is sad.    Nippon is not immune. Pre-Covid, Japan already had legions of fans, mainly young men, waving light sticks at concerts given by the very generously proportioned, long legged, big eyed, super cute, singing idol, Hatsune Miku.  Unfortunately, she isn’t real, because she is a hologram, an illusion.  If some people are that desperate for human interaction, that they

The following scenario will feel familiar to Japan old hands.  The foreign enterprise hires the retired President of a local company to run their operation.  After five years it begins to become obvious the enterprise is getting nowhere.  The aging President is retired out of the company and HQ dispatches one of their local leaders to Japan to turn things around.  The brief is to get the Japan business moving and produce results.  To a hammer everything looks like a nail and the foreign change agent Hammer has just landed at Haneda Airport.    Things don’t look right to the Hammer.  The way of working isn’t the same as back home.  There seems to be plenty of institutionalised inefficiencies.  After some perfunctory meetings with direct reports, the orders start to flow from the Hammer.  Weeks go by and then the Hammer notices things which should be happening are not happening.  Thinking back, there was no resistance to the Hammer’s directives at the Department Heads’ meeting.  Everyone got their marching orde

Never surrender, no capitulation, “quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit”, “when you are going through hell, keep going”.  The leader is the organisation’s rock, it’s talisman, the one who overcomes all.  The mindset is hard headed, stubborn, able to persevere no matter what.  Confusingly, the leader also has to be flexible, supple, adaptable and adjustable.  These opposites remind me of the yin yang symbol, the essence of dualism.  How should we leaders operate in this dualistic ecosystem, where we are called upon to be hard headed and yet pliable at the same time?   When you think about it, leaders become leaders because most other people just can’t be bothered.  As Yogi Berra, the American philosopher once noted, “Leading is easy.  It’s getting people to follow you which is hard”.  That is the reason most people are followers – leading others is hard work, problematic and stressful.    As the boss, we sometimes have to fire people who underperform and unless you are a corporate psychopath, this is unpl

Marcel Danne, an Executive Coach whom I have never met or talked to, recently put up an idea on social media about how managers have a different perspective to leaders.  He contrasted how a manager’s priority is “know, feel and sense” while the leaders priority is “sense, feel and know”.  This is esoteric stuff at first blush, but it is a useful insight.  I was thinking about myself when I was a manager.    For some inexplicable reason I thought I knew what to do.  I was fully confident in my own ability and my feeling was that I had the answers and the clarity to know what we should be doing.  I had the get up and go to execute on my plan, keeping my head down and relentlessly bulldozering forward. The effort was centralised in me as the person accountable for the results. If I want your opinion, “then I will give it to you”, type of thing.  I wonder if other leaders can recognise themselves anywhere here?   Why are we so confident about our ideas and opinions and so uninterested in what anyone else thinks? 

I remember the mockery, the cynical sneering, the derision about leaders having “visions”. The implication was they had lost the plot and were lurching into psychobabble. Being a cynical Aussie, I was probably one of the smarty pants commentariat pronouncing the whole thing a ragged jest.  Why was that?  I wish I had taken notes, but my memory tells me the content of those early leader vision efforts were trite, humdrum platitudes and so easily able to double hat as viable cures for insomnia.  So much has changed and the vision, mission and values of the organisation have become staples of leadership culture building focus.  A lot of the results of these efforts are still dubious though and It would be a good thing if your staff knew what the vision, mission and values actually were.  Objectively, if you can’t recall them, then it is impossible to own them or live them.   Unfortunately, staff don’t know them in many cases.  How do I know this? One of the party tricks for trainers going into corporate environm

People are very creative, although many would not describe themselves that way.  This is often the case because the environment they have experienced has been unfriendly toward innovation.  Had they been given the right opportunity to be creative, then a lot of excellent previously untapped ideas would have come forth.  In firms, we do have idea sessions and sometimes even specific brainstorming sessions, but it is rare that these actually produce anything other than a major hole in our calendar.  Or sometimes we have the opposite problem.  There are some really good ideas generated and then nothing is ever done with them. They duly join all the other great, but wasted “dead on arrival” ideas, in the communal graveyard for corporate innovation.  Even if the leaders have done a good job and created a culture favouring innovation, there are still many leagues to travel, before any of these idea ever see their application light of day.    Ideas start individually.  The stimulation for the idea can come from anyw

Innovation is not the monopoly of the R&D Department.  Everyone of our staff has highly tuned antennae which pick up valuable commercial intelligence about consumer trends, supplier data and client feedback.  Just because they are not wearing white lab coats, doesn’t mean their insights should be ignored.  Yet that is what we do in most companies.  Innovation is the application of creative ideas into practical products and services.  The germ of the idea is where the creativity component comes in and this is available to anyone.  The journey from creative idea to idea application treads a path which transcends the scope of one individual.  This is where the wheels fall off and most companies cannot capitalize on the latent creativity inside their firms.   Our recent global survey on creative ideas at work uncovered some disturbing findings.  Given the intense competition in the marketplace for companies, you would expect that leaders would be doing all they could to seize and shepherd creative ideas throu

Regardless of what level of leader we are, from neophyte to legend, there are four attributes which we need to master and keep remastering, because business never sleeps.  There are leaders who are busy, busy working in their business and then there are those who make the time to work on their business.  The biggest component of working on their business should be working on themselves.  This however tends to be neglected.  We graduate from varsity, learn on the job, maybe we can lob in an executive education week, at a flash, brand name business school, but the day to day consumes us.  Before you know it, the last serious work on yourself as a leader was many, many years ago.  Often all you have to show for the passage of time is a thinning hairline or more grey (or both), a more generous waistline and higher blood pressure.   Leadership as a discipline requires constant study.  We need people to work longer, so the generations in the workplace have increased up to five for the first time in history.  Younge

We are often leadership practitioners, rather than genteel philosophers, pontificating on leadership issues.  Yet, we have probably developed a certain style of leadership nevertheless.  We just haven’t focused on it as a methodology, because we are too busy doing it.  We leave the books and articles to the academics, who study this stuff with intellectual rigour, complete vast research projects and then write about business from atop their ivory towers.  Or we leave it to other successful business people to have ghost writers assemble their mad ramblings into a coherent form and get it published.  Or we have that rare bird amongst businessmen, someone who can write their own tome on the subject.   If we think about the concept of kaizen, continuous improvement, it would make sense to apply this to ourselves, as leaders in our businesses.  We should take a moment and examine just what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it.  In this way, we can analyse where there are gaps, inadequacies and

Covid is raging again, but we can see the end, be it this year or next year. It will finally stop being our total focus.  So many lives, livelihoods and businesses have been destroyed by this pandemic.  Ali Bab is a nice little French Restaurant near my office in Akasaka that has been closed since January.  Will they be able to reopen?  Hopefully they and many other businesses will do so and we can all get back to some semblance of normality.    That means we will see an uptick in business activity as consumer demand is reignited.  In that mix we will see the re-booting of the “war for talent”.  Many bosses have been weighing the cost of losing staff against the gain in cash flow, through lowering one of the biggest expenses in business – people.  Some businesses may have to re-hire staff they laid off, if they can, or find replacements. All of this activity is likely to happen roughly around the same time, so there could be a hiring frenzy.  Recruiters will start calling your best people to offer them new em

The faintest glimmer of hope is reflecting off a trillion hypodermic needle tips, as we vaccinate our way out of the Covid pandemic nightmare.  Very shortly, we will be back into it, but actually what will we be doing in this totally time shifted world.  We have lost nearly two years of our normal lives, as well as millions of loved ones, through this virus.  My colleague Matt Norman in Minnesota gave a presentation at our virtual Dale Carnegie Owner’s Meeting which focused on some of the challenges we will face going forward and I have adapted it for Japan.  Here are five trends we need to start thinking about.   Managing a split workforce Covid will be contained, but many in our workforce won’t be satisfied to be contained in the office anymore.  They want the freedoms of working from home to continue to some extent.  Regimented lives, genie like, have tasted freedom and won’t be so easily stuffed back in the 9 to 11 bottle.  How do we avoid a two class system evolving of those present and accounted for a

The most fatal words ever spoken by a leader are , “it will be faster if I do it myself”.  No it won’t.  If you want to scare yourself, sit down and write down all the tasks that you face both regular and irregular.  That is one long, long list for leaders.  Are you really going to be able to get through all of these items and take care of filing your taxes on time, see the kids sports events, have a romantic dinner with your partner, lie on the couch and read a book, magazine or the newspapers?  In short, you won’t, because you will be working all of the time, putting off life to earn a living.  The treadmill you should be the on is the one down at the gym, not the one where you are working like a dog, because you are trying to do it all yourself.   Inherently, we know we should delegate, but we have had prior bad experiences with it and are now gun shy about using this important tool in our leader toolkit.  When I was growing up in Australia there was a common expression that “a good workman doesn’t blame h

Shareholders put up their future security in the hope of increasing their returns and adding further to their security.  They take risk of losing some or all of their dough.  CEO remuneration is often tied to how well they increase value for shareholders by driving the share price up and paying out regular fat dividends.   Customers buy the product or service, so without them being enthusiastic, the scale of the revenues will fall and so will the share price and dividends.  Without engaged employees, the customer won’t be satisfied with the quality of the solution or the service provision.  If you don’t care about the company, then you are unlikely to care about the firm’s customers.  These interests are not always aligned, so where does the leader need to assign attention?   There is no business without a customer and the reason you have customers is because your staff make sure you have repeater customers, rather than single transactions.  CEO attention however is not always focused on the staff.  They can

We are all striving to survive these VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) fraught and frightening times.  Covid has taken huge numbers of vibrant people.  The loss to families has been immense and devastating.  Companies have lost collective corporate memories, a hoard of rich experiences and real wisdom.  The survivors carry on, never assured they will not succumb too at some point.  Vaccinations proffer the opportunity to secure herd immunity and defeat the spread of the virus.  What next for those survivor leaders and what do they need to be working on for a post-pandemic world?   Own The Future Well organized leaders lead intentional lives.  What does that mean?  They have goals and plans and they calibrate and recalibrate their progress.  They are brutally buffeted, but not thrown totally off course by unpredictable, violent direction changes.  The ancients believed that their fate was not at their determination.  Many of our staff are still with the ancients on that one and are not l

If the client complains directly to your staff member about their poor service, should you go to bat for your team member?  Should you publicly apologise and deal with the errant staff member privately?  Should you make a public show of solidarity with the staff member and criticise the manner in which the complaint was made?  Should you aggressively argue the point with the client?  Should you just ignore it and get back to other pressing matters?    The answers to these real life situations will differ, depending on the culture of your society and your legal system.  America is a very litigious society and there seems to be a built in reflex to not admit guilt, accountability or responsibility.  The upshot of this positioning is to ignore what was said to your staff member and hope it goes away naturally, after the client has gotten their complaint off their chest.  Privately, the boss can then commiserate about the “nasty” client and bond with the staff member.   Loopholes are always in high demand in thes

“October this year is when we can expect the turn around to kick off here in Japan”.  Being the sunny optimist from Australia, that land of vast horizons and sweeping plains, that sounded doable a few months ago.  Now we have a fourth wave, hospitable beds in Osaka are full and no room for new cases, as the numbers surge.  This is the fourth lockdown and this current iteration has been almost continuous this year since the start of January.  The vaccine roll out is slow and projections are grim.  The best case scenario is that we have three more lockdowns between now and March 2022.  The worst case scenario is that we have four lockdowns during that period.   So how do you plan anything in such a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world?  The basics don’t change however, so let’s revisit them.  We need to be clear about our purpose, our WHY. We do this through our Vision, Mission and Values.  This stuff is not outdated.  It is the glue we need to meld the team together and help each other get through