The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Productivity Not Immigration   During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for the first time. They often created havoc in international destinations, because they were so gauche – a bit like we are experiencing now with mass Chinese tourism. Companies bought up foreign companies and real estate at a rapid clip. French champagne and beluga caviar was being downed at a an alarming pace.   Finding Japanese workers became difficult, so the Japanese government turned to immigration. We had a very special immigration however. Countries with oil like Iran were allowed to send their citizens to Japan without requiring visas and suddenly we had an influx of Iranians, a bit

How To Resolve Internal Conflicts   Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained.   Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations!   Imagine our forebears w

Fear and Loathing In Japan   The Spa magazine in Japan released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. The Lehman Shock in 2008 opened to door to job losses in larger companies, something which only had been possible in smaller forms in the past. The sense of lifetime employment as a given was removed and a brand new world of work emerged.   Feeling unappreciated is a construct of leadership. The Japanese system of hierarchy in companies has followed the lessons proffered during the military service experienced by those who participated in World War Two. Brutalisation was widespread and everyone was expendable. Postwar leaders in the West were also the graduates of battle as well. Things changed in the late 1960s however and modern economies moved away from the old military m

Big Brother Japan Inc Style   “What anchors their behavior is the salaryman’s desire to protect himself – no one wants to put their position at risk by telling the truth”. This little gem of an insight was made by a retired nuclear engineer who worked for Toshiba. He was referring to the various scandals that had taken place there and explaining why illegal decisions made by senior management like cooking the books went unchecked internally.   Corporate Japan in some ways, could be a modern model for George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”. Big Brother is the leadership who define that truths are lies and lies are truths. That anyone against the system must be eliminated because 100% loyalty is the minimum. There are facts and then there are “alternative facts”. We do the thinking around here, your job is to carry out our genius ideas.   This is not surprising because kids are inculcated into accepting authority, doing not questioning, following authority figures even if they are only one year older. Sempai (s

Bad Business Battlefield Promotions  In the military, junior officers are the equivalent of middle management in business. In times of warfare these middle managers are often wounded or killed in battle. There are no replacements from officer school, so the most capable member of the team is promoted on the battlefield, as the replacement leader. It makes no sense in business to have this as the model. Yet, this is often what happens.   The current middle manager is poached by a vigilant recruiter or they jump ship for greener pastures. The organisation has had no capacity or has given no great thought to the issue of succession planning and there is no opportunity to transfer in a seasoned manager as the replacement. The most capable member of the team is tapped on the shoulder to step up into a leadership role. How are these individuals judged to be the most capable? Usually, this is never based on their leadership capability, because they have never had an opportunity to display their latent talent. It is

Positive Mindset For Leaders   How do we set up a positive mindset?  More importantly how do we set it up from morning when we awake and when we start work?  What are we feeding our mind?  What things are occupying our thoughts?  How do we control what we allow into our mind?  Who has influence over our mindset?  Are we in control or are we being controlled?   Usually, our start of the day begins with a quick scan of our email or social media to see what has happened overnight. The problems of yesterday and the one’s we will be facing hereafter are brought straight into the brain from the start of the day. We then access the media in some format or other, but the content is consistently the same – predominantly bad news!   Is this the best way to get us into a positive mindset? It is reality and we are unlikely to change the need to access our email or to check on world and local events. We could just ignore it all, but in this fast paced world, that is a luxury that we won’t be enjoying anytime soon.   We ca

Hey Boss, Teach Your Japanese Staff How To Relax     METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and industry), and the peak industry bodies the Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and industry have launched their Premium Friday campaign, encouraging firms to allow their workers to depart early on the last Friday of each month. Approximately 70% of the Japanese economy is based on domestic consumption and the idea is to give consumers more time to consume, thus stimulating the economy. All good stuff, but there is a deeper problem for companies than more consuming.   Parkinson’s law that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” fits Japan perfectly. The very long hours spent in work in japan are producing work at a relatively glacial pace. There is a surprisingly slow rhythm here in white collar work. If you want to see work being done at a fast clip, then look at the manufacturer’s factories and the construction industry.   Big city office workers though are a dif

Japanese Leaders Needed Now   Rising in a company in Japan requires talent, but this is often held hostage to time. Your age, longevity and seniority in the system are factors that often trump talent.  The usual internal talent development programme is based on OJT (On The Job Training).  This is fine if your boss is a great practitioner, communicator and coach.  Not many of those floating around Japan.   There is also a degree of humility (or is it fear of failure?) in Japan that surprises the gaishikei foreign multi-national company foreign bosses.   Inexplicably, they see potential rising stars decline promotions. When they ask why they are told because “they don't feel they are ready yet”.  As we move along the demographic trend line of a declining youth population, every company will need more people willing to step up to replace those retiring. The “I am not ready” mentality needs to shift some gears.   Looking at how people rise in organisations in Japan there are some interesting tweaks. The Personal

Leaders Who Can’t Listen   Dynamic, powerful, driven, single-minded leaders get stuff done.  They are resourceful, disciplined, patient, highly demanding of themselves.  They are often poor listeners.  They are so focused on making things happen, getting decisions executed, pushing through, that conversations become monologues rather than dialogues.  They are so into their thing, that they want to talk about that and not much else.  Often they are the founder of the business or someone sent in to turn it around.   Crash through or crash is tattooed on the inside of their brain.  In Japan, if you are an entrepreneur, then you have additional hurdles to overcome.  The process of overcoming them sets up a style, a default operating procedure where you have to push like crazy to get anything done in this country.    The danger is the under done listening component of the skill base can be denying access to opportunities.  Vital information isn't being processed.  This is because the leader is only operating with

Leaders Be Persuasive   A friend of mine was lamenting that he had not taken the time to complete our High Impact Presentations Course. He had had it in the back of his mind for some time, that he really ought to work on these key skills, but had never managed to lock it down and actually do it. Now he is facing a really, really big pitch and he knows his capacity isn’t where it needs to be. He is not fully confident he can be successful. Uh oh!   As the leader we represent the “face” of the company. People judge the whole thing on what they see us do. Usually, they don’t get to peek behind the scenes like we see famous entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk from Vaynermedia doing with his daily video blog called the “Daily Vee”. Our public persona is usually much more contained and controlled. Internal meetings are internal and we can be a bumbling, horrible communicator and only our long suffering staff are any the wiser.   Public forays do pop up in the most unexpected places though. It might be the school PTA meeti

Accountability In Your Team     Holding our people accountable is one of the basics of being a leader. They flounder, deadlines pass unheeded, things get missed, work is not completed to a satisfactory standard.  Why is that?  People are not trying to fail in their jobs, but they do let the team down with their poor performance and lack of accountability.  What can we do about it?   As the leader we have to start with ourselves. The most crucial resource we have is our time and how we choose to use it.  If we are poor time managers then we apply unnecessary stress to our own lives and those of our colleagues.  We show up with unreasonable turn around times for work, because we were not properly organized.  We become very stressed and that spreads like an epidemic across the team. Our stress immediately impacts our mood control and our mood can lighten or darken the workplace within seconds.   We are time poor because we haven't done a good enough job on defining our priorities.  We are also rushing around bec

Boss Stimulation Is Needed   Our education moves through many transitions.  We do our basic academic education at school and university and then we hit the university of life.  Company education programs begin with very basic induction sessions.  We may be studying technical subjects for regulatory requirements or the firms specified areas for further study.  We might get some rudimentary soft skill education, although the majority of companies rely on OJT - On The Job training, particularly in Japan.     During the middle management years we might get some leadership training or in the case of large firms be despatched to some worthy academic institution for a week of executive training.  The instructors are academics, the case study method is a favorite as is group work.  Often the course colleagues are from around the globe.  The whole thing is fascinating and very cool.  The nature of the approach means we are usually focused on the middle to distant future.  Very macro and broad in nature.     It is hard

Get Ready For Your Productivity Nosedive     Brace yourself for everything to take a big hit. Speed, attention to detail, output, results are about to fall off a cliff. No this has nothing to do with currency rates, trade regulations, tariffs, gunboat diplomacy or anything Donald Trump is about to do as President. This is here in Japan, right now and mainly relevant in the major cities. This is when JPY750billion is about to get taken out of domestic consumption, lowering the nation’s GDP by 0.6%.   Roughly one third of your team in Tokyo are going to become a lot less productive, as they battle with the demon pollen plague that hits every spring. Cherry blossom time has had the gloss taken off it substantially, since the cedar pollen levels have risen to such grandiose heights. Those pinky-white buds herald the onset of a living hell. It is hard to concentrate when you are crying and your eyes are so itchy you think you are going to go crazy. Just to offset these maladies, you can insert massive intermittent

Hey Donald Trump, Try “Winning Friends and Influencing People” Instead   Donald Trump’s phone call with Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s Prime Minister was major news. The tastier parts of that conversation were leaked from the American side, but the style and language reported seems to be in keeping with Donald Trump’s style, so they are probably true. Did he have to take such an aggressive approach with Malcolm? Could he have dealt with his concerns over bringing people into the US in a different way?   The issue here is Trump doesn’t want to honour the people swap agreement previously made between Obama and Turnbull. His choice to criticise Turnbull over the phone was a poor one. Dale Carnegie came up with 30 Human Relations Principles and Donald Trump would do much better, if he followed them. As Dale Carnegie noted, you get more cooperation with honey than vinegar.   Principle number one is “don’t criticise, condemn or complain”. The thinking behind this principle is to take into account human psychology. W

Buying People  When we buy a company, we are buying the people and all the “assets” - plant and equipment come with them, rather than the other way around. The due diligence gets done, the books are looked at carefully for any signs of “cooking”. Hidden debts, secret undertakings, compliance and regulatory issues are scrutinized. The people part however is given a “once over lightly” look because this is much harder to do thoroughly, than the other investigations. HR can tell us a lot about the structure of the pay arrangements, who are the high potentials, previous performance review results and the current staffing levels. Gauging staff productivity however is much more obtuse. The silly part though is that this is exactly what we are buying – staff productivity.   Often, the perceived productivity gap is “fixed” by firing staff to reduce costs and at the same time drive the leaders to push the team harder for higher revenues. This scenario usually doesn’t happen straight away. It takes time to get a sense

Still Stinky Performance Assessments   Seems hardly a day goes by when yet another big player announces they are no longer using annual performance assessments. Basically, this is a combination of clever corporate PR and a recognition that their managers were not up to the job of leading their people. Performance assessments have moved from once a year to twice a year as a formal construct, to now regular discussions between leaders and the led. Has anything really changed except the patina of modernity and cutting edge investor relations department propaganda?   The issues are the same. How do we evaluate our teams, how do we determine who to promote or reward with pay rises, bonuses, higher commissions etc?. How do we get some consistency across the entire organisation, so that the same performance level is evaluated and rewarded in basically the same manner? When you have big teams this is tricky. Whether we are doing these reviews weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annually makes littl

2017: Three Day Train Wreck   Japanese language has lots of insightful sayings and “mikka bozu” or only lasting as a priest for three days is one of them. It means we wilt in our determination and fold after just three days of commitment. On day one, when we start the new year, we are full of resolve, like an aspirant priest. The daily realty as we move through the year though, saps our ability to deliver on our initial best intentions.   If you feel a mikka bozu departure coming on, over the next weeks and months, here are a couple of ideas on how to deal with that less than satisfactory turn of events.   Don’t beat yourself up You may have been setting goals when flushed with the excitement of the moment, but the cold dawn of reality has now sunk in and you realise that maybe you were being a bit too presumptuous.   No problem. Re-set and focus anew on outcomes that are achievable and which can help to build some momentum. With resolutions we tend to be all in or all out. When we realise we were actually ki

Be The Light On The 2017 Hill     New Year, new starts or not? We religiously muscle up in January to set our resolutions to improve ourselves in the coming 12 months. Often these resolutions are inwardly focused. Lose weight, get better organized, be more patient, etc. This year, let’s set a breakthrough goal and make it really worthwhile going through this process. Let’s become a catalyst, a trigger, a spark to become the light on the hill for others around us. “Be the change you want to see” is a great Gandhi quote and tremendously wise and insightful.   We can start by changing how we see others. Instead of being a perpetual “fault finder”, a corrector of errors, a righteous blade to cut those making mistakes, a terminator of the terrible, why not try another approach? Rather than putting others down for their failings, why not become a person who is a serial encourager and builder of others?   Imagine the type of workplace you want to work in? Is it rife with politics, backstabbing, petty power tussles,

2017: Good Or Bad?   There are many starts to a year. Some are based on financial years, zodiacs and calendar years. Generally speaking though, January 1st signals a new start and we are re-connected with our better selves. Those extra kilos we need to shed, getting down to the gym more regularly, eating more healthily, drinking less booze and all the other typical personal and work aspirations we embrace for a better new year to come are commonplace goals. All excellent stuff and hopefully this time we will carry through on our brilliant starts.   How about setting a serious goal though? Why don’t we make a commitment to stop complaining in 2017? This means a total overhaul of our brain. We have a lot of concerns, stresses and worries in our daily lives, so complaining comes very naturally. It doesn’t take us anywhere though. We just focus on something that is either already done and irretrievable or we express some concern over something that might happen in the future. Well it might not happen too. Perhaps

Dangerous People   It sounds quite obvious not to hire people who are dangerous. The problem is people can have a nice resume, can sound quite articulate in interviews and we buy this false persona.   They can also have a lot of energy, can be quite forthright and outgoing. They are often brimming with confidence and self-belief. On the surface, it all looks fine. The issues come out though in dribs and drabs.   They often have a weak association between their mouth and their brain. They shoot their mouth off, with great vigor, babbling stuff and easily overwhelm others around them. The content of this babbling becomes the future pain point for the organisation. Their mouths are too fast for their brains. Stream of consciousness thinking probably works better in literature, than it does in business.   I was facilitating a brainstorming session and observed a painful reality. Loud, aggressive, dim people can do major damage to companies. They compensate for their intellectual inferiority complex by becoming ve