Podcast Dale Carnegie Japan

Multiple award winning filmmaker and CEO of a video production company based in Tokyo, Japan. A former professional wrestler (under the ring name Rionne Fujiwara) and martial artist -Aikido, kickboxing, catch wrestling. Bilingual English and Japanese audio and visual professional from the Gold Coast in Australia, with almost 20 years’ experience li…

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. Usually the time between your name being called and you actually being handed the microphone can be counted in m…

Japan is excellent at being two faced. In the West, this has a pejorative air, but in Japan this is how harmony can be maintained and everyone plays their part in keeping the public and private faces far apart. This means that a typical western approach of getting the two warring individuals into a room and thrashing out a solution usually doesn’t …

If we have done a professional job in selling we will have understood what the buyer is attempting to achieve and we will have concluded if we have a solution that matchs or not. Following that we need to explain the solution to the buyer and convince them that this is what they need. Japan presents a danger at this point. There is a ravenous hunge…

It is a mystery why more people don’t bring storytelling into their presentations. Technical subjects may seem to be oblivious to storytelling, because we are only dealing with hard data. Absolutely not the case. This type of dry talk really benefits from injecting stories into the presentation. Numbers can be brought to life through telling storie…

Saxo Bank is a securities broker started thirty years ago in Denmark and they have been in Japan for 13 years. He started working in banking in Denmark and 14 years ago joined Saxo Bank. He came to Japan two years ago and had lived here before twenty years ago when he wa studying here. At that time he was studying mathematical infomatics at the Uni…

Pushy salespeople are very, very annoying. They try to bug you into buying and none of us like it. We may actually buy, but we don’t like them anymore and probably won’t become a repeat buyer. Fair enough, but what about when you are the salesperson? At what point should we give up on convincing the buyer that our solution is the best for them? Hav…

Once upon a time in Japan there would be a thick pile of resumes sitting on your desk for you to go through and select the new potential hires for interview. You would conduct rounds of meetings, put them to the test in certain skill sets and then make a studied decision to bring onboard the best person. They were nervous and you had all the power …

For most places in the world, and Japan in particular, when you find a good salesperson, you tend to stick with them. Why is that? There is a huge trust component to the idea that this person is someone you can rely on and who isn’t going to rob you blind, so that they get rich at your expense. There are so many unprofessional salespeople floating …

In some professions, there is a lot of media scrutiny on what the speaker is saying. The organisation they represent also has very strict rules around who can say what. This makes giving the presentation very restrictive and difficult. Usually, the people in that line of work, are used to giving these types of presentations, so they are accustomed …

Matsuba san previously had been General Manager Japan Healthcare IT at GE. Before that she was Director of Business Planning at the Columbia Medical Center. She started her career in the Japanese Post Office bureaucracy. She graduated for Keio University in economics and has an MBA from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.…

No one wants to be sold, but we love to buy. The difference between these two approaches comes down to the mindset of the salesperson and their sales abilities. The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don’t believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this “whatever” to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out…

Leaders are different from managers. Managers have to make sure everything is humming. The quality standards have to be met. The logistics have to flow smoothly, so that production is working well. The budget has to be met and there should be no over spending taking place. Leaders have to do all of this, plus two other key roles. One is setting the…

In Japan, we meet the client, build the rapport, seek permission to ask questions, ask the questions and then we set the date and time for the next meeting. Usually, in the first meeting this is where we expect to get to and we know we have to come back with a lot more detail for the second meeting. What level of detail do we need to go into in the…

We know that being formal and stiff creates distance between the speaker and the audience. We also know that a “conversational tone” is ideal, as it creates a strong feeling of inclusivity between the presenter and those in the room. That conversational tone means a relaxed style on the part of the speaker, but how relaxed? We gauge people’s educat…

166 Dr. Andrijana Cvetkovikj, CEO & President BrioNexus. Andrijana is also a special Advisor for International Affairs to the Japanese government, and previously was Director, Economist Corporate Network North Asia and Ambassador to Japan for Macedonia. She studied film and received her Ph.D. from Nihon University.…

Trying to explain Japan to your boss back at HQ is a real pain. HQ ideas on solutions for Japan rarely hit the mark. One of the dubious delights of running an international business in Japan is dealing with the Mother Ship or it’s Regional Hub spin off. Trying to explain Japan to those who don’t know Japan, has always proven tremendously character …

The Ongoing Nightmare Of Small Business Recruiting There are more jobs than candidates in Japan and this situation will only worsen from the boss’s viewpoint. Those halcyon days of wading through a big pile of resumes and tossing most away, have well and truly gone. If you get any resumes these days, you think you should go and buy a takurakuji (lo…

Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients. Thought Leadership and Intellectual Property are given away for free to establish our credentials with the buyers. If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals. So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts…

There are facts, provable information, data, research results and opinions. What is the right mix when presenting? Should we just marshal the detail, lay it out for the audience and let them draw their own conclusions or do we need to direct them? How expert do we have to be to start handing out advice to others? Are we seeding the emergence of opp…

Previously Michael was a co-founder of Neural Squared, CEO of Hypnotize, Technical Solutions Consultant on Android and Partner Technology Manager on YouTube at Google. He has a Master of Engineering Computer Science degree from The University of Electro-Communications

Doing more, better, faster with less, screams out for innovation. This could be a kaizen approach of continuous improvement or it could be breakthrough leaps. . How much scope can we allow in the creative process? At the practical level, this is really asking how many and how huge are the mistakes you will tolerate to achieve good ideas? Leader hav…

The boss is the light on the hill, radiating positive energy, belief, confidence and possibility. The moody boss can destroy the atmosphere in the office very quickly. We all know that, so we have to become expert thespians, masking our true feelings and putting on a fun face to the outside world. When things get tough, there are no people the boss…

Usually in Japan, we meet more than one buyer. In Western meetings, it is more likely to be a one-on-one situation. Sometimes the buyer boss will bring others to the meeting and they are there to represent their functions and report back what has taken place. The danger is we just focus on the boss and ignore their henchmen. These hangers-on have i…

I was held up at the hospital, which those who live in Tokyo will know, is a typical occurrence, so I was late to the presentation. One of the speakers had just started, as I slid into my seat at the back. The screen was hard to read, because the scale of the content was small. The presenter was speaking in a voice range which was probably fine for…

Previously Jonathan was Managing Director Japan for Cornerstone OnDemand, Country Manager Japan for Credorax, Country Manager Japan for Paypal and when Director of Strategy Softbank Group, he worked very closely with legendary Softbank founder Masayoshi Son.

It is so easy to become “Johnny One Note” when presenting. We get locked into a modality of voice and body language power. We just keep hammering away with that mode throughout the whole talk. That might be fine for us, but for our audience it is killing them If we have a lot of energy, are excited about our topic and eager to share the goodies wit…

I am always amused by rather youngish “life coaches” or “executive coaches”. It seems incongruent, because their experience of business life seems so thin. They haven’t risen inside their organisations, have never had massive responsibilty or a major P&L to worry about. They seem to be everywhere and astoundingly they find people willing to give th…

Every professional salesperson has a set script of how the sales call will run. Amateur salespeople just turn up and don’t try to direct the action. Having a set script means we know what will happen during the call, what the stages will be, what we will say at certain points, what we want to know from the client and how the call will conclude. We …

“You are too loud”, “You are too high energy”. These were some survey comments following some training I was delivering for 60 managers for a client. You can imagine that the venue to hold ten tables of 6 participants each has to be quite large and spacious and that was the case. To project to an audience that size, in such a large venue, means you…

Previously President, Faurecia Howa Interiors Japan. Masters in Management, Entrepreneurship and Global Leadership D.E.A. Engineering, Universidade de Vigo, M.S. Degree Water Engineering, Polytech Montipellier

Speaking in front of others makes many people tongue tied and nervous. They struggle to get through a simple presentation, internally, in front of their colleagues. A public audience is something they would flee from, screaming and waving their hands in the air. Why is that? We all learn how to talk. The presentation is just a talk, so what is the …

The contrast was striking. I went from one boss, who was super demanding, scary even, to a very easy going leader. I thought, “this is good”, well, at least for a while. When I realised that he would agree with whoever was last in his office, I realised there was no core here. He was being nice to all and that meant he wasn’t taking any hard decisi…

Salespeople are always desperate to make a sale. There are targets, quotas, KPIs aplenty and the pressure is unrelenting. When you are in a downturn, a recession, a pandemic etc., which are driving down sales, the desperation becomes even more intense. Getting meetings at all is considered a win and we go for it, regardless of whether the buyer is …

“I have been presenting since I was 17, but I am not good at engaging the audience”. This comment from a man in his fifties was telling. He was in a very technical area which requires a highly acute mind and he is a leader in that field. He has a big job today for a famous brand name firm. If he has been getting lots of practice presenting since a …

Alex Zoboli, is the Managing Director of Cornerstone Recruitment, a company he founded with Matt Nicholls four years ago. Previously Alex was a senior leader at RGF in Japan, working together with Matt, part of the Recruit Group. Before that he was working in a recruitment company in the UK.Oleh Dr. Greg Story

Most talks and presentations we hear, we cannot recall. Why is that? We were there presumably because we had an interest. Part of the problem is the way people present their information in the first place. The slides are too dense and confusing. The delivery is done in a lethargic manner, devoid of passion, with zero body language backing up the ke…

Japan has always been a country which has adapted to weather and seismic conditions. Traditional housing was built on the assumption that earthquakes would less easily destroy wooded houses with built in flex points. High-pitched roof angles allowed snow to fall more easily from the roof and prevent the snow’s weight from crushing those inside. Thi…

Buyers don’t know us at first, so all they have to go on is the brand and our personality. If the brand is a powerful selling point, great, but for many smaller companies that is not something which is going to make the sale for you. A lot of Japanese salespeople rely on the brand. They never learn how to do sales as a professional and instead deci…

How much is too much? For the expert, the boundaries on this equation can be quite broad. For them, we are only tapping into the very superficial elements of this worthy subject. They have so many layers at their disposal and they can go to exquisite depths of complexity and nuance, within a heartbeat. When they are addressing the great unwashed, t…

Matt Nicholls, is the President of Cornerstone Recruitment a company he founded with Alex Zoboli four years ago. Previously Matt was the President of RGF in Japan, part of the Recruit Group. Before that he was running his own small recruitment company in the UK.Oleh Dr. Greg Story

The vast majority of us are amateurs, when it comes to negotiating. Even in business, we would only be involved a few times a year perhaps in a major negotiation. Rather than trying to work it out by ourselves let’s take a look at some guidelines to make the whole process easier. Sadly, not everyone is like us – wonderful, charming, amusing, attrac…

Japan is a unique country where underperformance is not considered a legitimate reason to terminate someone’s employ. Leaders new to the country will often run into this issue. They arrive with a mandate from HQ to “fix” Japan and get it up to a required performance standard. As soon as the new broom brings in changes to achieve the HQ revenue targ…

Recently, I was asked to do a hands-on session regarding post-Covid sales for a group of CEOs. What was interesting to me was the different idiosyncratic approaches many of them had come up with to make sales. It was immediately clear that none of them had ever had any sales training. This meant that they had been relying on trial and error and hop…

When we are giving a public presentation, it is rare that we will be given carte blanche by the organisers to promote our product or service. That type of blatant self-promotion is frowned upon and your reputation in the market will be negatively impacted. Great, but I want to sell more stuff. How can we promote ourselves without seeming to be brea…

Mr. Mizusawa started his career in HR for Sanyo, GE in the USA, GE Healthcare back in Japan and was Director, Compensation & Benefits at Abbott Japan Group. He joined Stryker as the Senior Director of Human Resources, before becoming the Vice-President of the MedSurg Business Unit, then Vice-President & General Manager Japan of Orthopaedics and Med…

The content was really great and the way the words were put together was quite clever. The speech was a dud. It failed miserably because it was a written speech, read to us. He could have emailed it to all of us and we could have read it for ourselves. The next speaker just spoke. He wasn’t such a fluent talker, sometimes stumbling over some of his…

It is very frustrating at times, being a leader. Staff don’t hit their targets, forget things they need to do, complete tasks in a less than satisfactory manner and make stupid mistakes. Time poor leaders are the norm, so we are always operating on minimums to get it all done. We are usually in a rush, and this is when we get ourselves into trouble…

When we meet the buyer in Japan, it will be extremely rare that they are the final decision-maker. Usually, there are other people sitting behind the meeting room wall, who will have an interest in any changes or new initiatives. A collective decision will be reached about whether or not they will proceed with you. Japan likes this splitting of the…

This last week I saw two speakers who were presenting, but both managed to do so with absolutely no presence. They could not command the room and they were both hard to hear. One was hosting an event with experts assembled, there to gain more knowledge. The other was leading the opening of a prestigious event to a very large audience in a big ballr…