The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

One Of the Biggest Leadership Challenges   How do you run your business.  Sharp on the cost control, right on top of the quality, working hard on building the brand, watchful of competitors, full throttle on appealing to shareholders and stakeholders?  There is one area that is going to become a bigger headache. That is people.   I am not talking about just training them. I am hearing from leaders in Japan that they are growing more concerned about getting staff and keeping them.  In the “good old days”, there were tonnes of staff to hire and fire as needed by Japanese companies, but that is changing big time. The lack of qualified staff is hitting across more and more industries.    There are multiple job openings for new hires from which to choose.  Why would they pick your company and even more importantly, why should they stay?   We know people don't leave companies, they leave bosses.  Today there is so much information about your shop available on-line, they can check you out thoroughly before they even

The Boss As Super Coach   The younger generation are the future and they want a different type of boss. That boss has to be a new model - persuasive, able to sell the WHY of the job, razor focused on building the team member’s careers, a brilliant communicator and personal coach. A snap really – probably be able to knock that lot off before lunch. Well maybe not.   In Japan, they are not making as many members of the younger generation as they used to, so what they want becomes very critical to the boss’s ability to meet the demands of the organisation. The over 65 age bracket in Japan is currently accounting for 33.45 million people, whereas those under 15 are only 15.88 million. That youth number will continue to decline.   Meeting their expectations means survival, because if you are losing them to your competitors, then you will run out of having enough staff to run the business. You can see it now in construction companies, convenience stores, even sushi restaurants in Tsukiji, all having to find non-Jap

The Madness Of Moods     Are you moody? You might say no. You see yourself as an upbeat individual, smoothly navigating your way through the workday. Good, but the workplace is roiling with confirmed, card carrying boss watchers. They have their antennae out every time you appear, as they gauge the risk level of any interaction with you today.   Should I raise that project possibility, talk about the budget, have that revenue results discussion, etc. They have been studying your body language, your gait, face and voice with such intensity, that they can easily distinguish your mood on any given day and throughout the day.   So if you are troubled, have you been a sufficiently skilled actor to mask the emotions coursing under that bespoke suit? We radiate information to our team regardless, but do we maintain our equilibrium when everyone around us is losing theirs? When everyone is panicking, are we an amplifier or a suppressor?   We are the boss, so we set the tone for the day. If we are up, we have a much b

Personal Visionary Leadership   Normally we think of a visionary leader as someone who shows us the way forward, who motivates, encourages and inspires us. The entry ticket to becoming a visionary leader though, is to have a clear vision for yourself. We are all notorious spruikers of pungent advice for others, none of which we normally adhere to in our own lives. This is where the visionary leader’s personal credibility bit sails right out the window.   Visions should be backed up with goals. Leading an “intentional life” is a good starting point as an aspiration. This means we don’t aimlessly wander through the decades, directionless or often becalmed. We choose to garner ten years of experience rather than achieving one year of experience ten times. We choose the way forward and we choose to work hard to realise those goals we have set for ourselves.   What is the timeframe to realise the vision? Where can we start? Let’s leave the company vision thing aside for the moment and concentrate on our personal v

Become Your Own First Responder   There are billions being spent in the beauty business, the weight loss, fashion and entertainment worlds. These are the fantasy lands from where we receive our images of success. By comparison, we are too short, too tall, too skinny, too fat, too poor, too whatever. Actors, sports stars, captains of industry all seem to be living the dream and we are barely making a living.   If only I had been born to wealthier parents, in a better neighbourhood, in a better city, in a better country. I wish I had a better education or had a better job, better prospects. I wish I had been dealt a better hand in life.   Stop wishing that because you are not going to be dealt a better hand. You have what you have, you can’t change what has happened in the past, but that doesn’t mean that is all you can ever have.   Many have made mistakes, specified poor choices, taken unwise paths, and have hung around with the wrong crowd. Face it, accept it, stop fighting it - you can’t undo the mistakes of

Trust   Leaders gain automatic trust by dint of their position power.  Title and authority ensure people will toe the line, laugh at our jokes, tell us “Yes”.  This type of trust only goes so far though in gaining the willing cooperation of the team members.  In a busy life however, with so many demands on our time, we mentally merge automatic trust with earned trust and confuse the two.  Earned trust differs from automatic trust because it is based on the reality of our interactions and communication with our team.  This is the “walk” as opposed to the “talk”.  We imagine we have established a trust relationship with the team and therefore are getting their full support for our efforts to progress the business.  As Yogi Berra once noted, " Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you that is the hard part".   Time management is closely related to trust.  The ability to leverage ourself as a leader and get others to work on projects for us, means we can concentrate on high level tasks that only we can

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 out.

The Boss’s Genius Ideas     Shinya Katanozaka President of ANA Holdings came up with a genius idea. Allow the passengers to order breakfast, lunch and dinner whenever they pleased. Passenger surveys showed the clients were in full agreement. What the boss had not anticipated was that passengers would order the meals immediately on take-off, making it impossible to deliver on the promise. The plan was soon scrapped.   The point here is not about being willing and unafraid to try new things, in order to differentiate ourselves from the hoi polloi of the competition. That courage and motivation is exemplary. The real issue is that no one inside the ANA organisation told the boss the “Emperor Has No Clothes”.   When you have dynamic leaders, you often get the “success at all costs no matter what” dynamism, that comes as part of their personality package. They are mentally strong, persuasive, disciplined, hard working, intolerant of weakness, tough, masterful and basically a handfull for everyone around them.   Is

Training Women in Japan   Discrimination against women in business in Japan takes many forms. Prime Minister Abe talks about targets for women in leadership positions in companies but not much has changed. In fact, he significantly lowered the targets after barely getting started on the campaign. I am a Rotarian in Japan and it is male bastion still. Rotary is a vast international organisation with the purpose of connecting diverse professions together, to build better networks and to contribute to the community.   In Japan around 94% of rotary clubs do not have women members. My own was the same until a few years ago. Every year since I joined in 2002, we have had internal debates about accepting females into our club. The “no women” faction has basically aged and passed on, over these last 14 years.   Of course, there were no regulations stating that women could not join, but the reality was women could never pass the selection protocol because of their gender. Happily that era has now passed and we are now

Japan: Your Educational Ladder Is On The Wrong Wall   Japanese education includes exciting things like adults screaming abuse, using threatening words, kids mouthing slogans at mass rallies and making over $2 million in a week.   We know that Japan has a well established escalator system for work and education. Enter on the correct ground floor and with the passing of time and effort, you get out at the top. Get accepted into the right elementary school and you will get into the right middle school, the right high school and then the right university. You graduate and get a job at the right company and then over decades of grind work your way up to the top.   Japan still loves rote learning and parents will pay cram schools to get their kids fully tuned up and on to the education escalator. I was watching a programme on television about the Waseda Academy’s week long training camp for aspirant future captains of industry. The programme focused on 6th year elementary students trying to get into the all importa

People Are A Pain   "All of our problems walk on two legs and talk back”. I can’t recall when I first came across this expression but it is true isn’t it. Most business problems can be fixed with more capital, technological breakthroughs, greater efficiencies, patience and time. People problems though are much trickier.   An after work drinks session erupts into an alcohol fuelled shouting match between two colleagues that doesn’t end there. The hostilities continue and now the entire work atmosphere is polluted with the bile between them.   The discussion about next year’s budget allocation turns nasty, as two strong willed leaders start a very public stoush aiming for some advantage over the other. Frosty relations prevail between these two silos within the firm thereafter and everyone is involved.   An innocuous remark by a colleague causes offense and now the boss has to deal with complaints about, “I can’t work with Taro anymore”.   Head Off Trouble Rather than trying to sort out the incidents, the rival

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