The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

Pandemics force change.  We keep thinking we have turned the corner in Japan, to be just shunted further down the road with another lockdown.  Being the eternal optimist from sunny Australia, I was running around telling my team we would see things get back to a better situation this October.  Now I read that A1 predictor modelling indicates we will peak in October.  That means things won’t get back to normal or closer to normal until early 2022.  That is a lot of cash flow needed between now and then.  Trying to bring the full intellectual power of the team to bear on a severe problem through brainstorming, has been a good way of finding ideas, to make sure you make it out the other side of this pandemic.   With more contagious virus variants now the majority of new cases, no wonder staff don’t want to huddle together and do brainstorming sessions.  Does that mean that we have to forego the idea generation power of the team to come up with ideas to solve the dilemmas facing us?  In some cases it probably mak

Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going”.  We have all been going through hell, compliments of the pandemic.  If you are Chinese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Thai, Kiwi or Aussie you have popped out the other side, now living a normal life, albeit one with many more restrictions and closed borders.  Virus mutations, great power self-interest and the breakdown of trust in institutions, threatens to make the pandemic a semi-permanent fixture for the next few years at least.  For leaders, that means we will be facing a new order, where our subordinates no longer congregate in the workplace. Effectively they have become invisible. Consequently, the traditional method of driving performance has become much more difficult.    An acquaintance of mine is on Clubhouse many times during the working day.  I know this, because I keep getting notifications about meetings and his name is there as one of the organisers.  If I was his boss, would I feel I was getting my monies worth from his work cont

The Clubhouse global audio conversation App is hot, hot, hot.  It is only available on Apple iOS so far, but the landgrab is on and massive hours are being invested in this bonseki style activity.  What is bonseki?  This is an original Japanese throw away art, where you create designs in the sand, on a tray and then toss it all out at the end.  That is your Clubhouse conversation, thrown out each day, with no distribution and no repurposing, as yet. Clubhouse might be the next great thing or it may be superseded by copycat platforms launched on Face Book, Twitter etc.  The concept though looks like it will become a permanent feature of our lives, in the same way podcasts have done.  Be careful though fellow leaders, we are now walking on the high wire with no safety net.  We have put our leader personal and professional brands at risk.   If you are asked to give a talk, you usually have time to think about it, prepare, gather visual aids and rehearse.  Despite that most leaders make a mess of the opportunity.

Recruiting and developing the perfect team is an illusion, a Fool’s Gold hot pursuit for leaders.  Even if you do manage to recruit great people, an increasingly difficult task in Japan where the population is in decline and the improvement of English skills is getting nowhere, they leave.  They start a family, get poached for more dough, get sick, need to take care of aging parents or a myriad of other reasonable reasons and you have to start again.  The reality is we are always going to be dealing with people in different stages of their career and ability build.  It is useful to know which solutions are appropriate for particular situations.   Japan loves the middle of the fence and sitting there is the most comfortable position.  In fact, in a mistake, defect free work culture like Japan that makes a lot of sense.  Building slack into your world means you never get strained to a point where you might make mistakes.  On the other hand, there is a lot of underperformance associated with being in the Comfort

Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age.  To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance.  Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way?  Probably not.  In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever.    The mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day.  We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7.  Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional.  We want something from them in exchange for salary.  We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list.  If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the

We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad.  He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel.  His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable.  Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achille’s heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us.  We can’t see our foibles, issues and problems, but they are blindingly obvious to everyone else working for us.  Remember, subordinates are all expert “boss watchers”.  They examine us in the greatest detail every day, in every interaction. Let’s examine what Zenger found and see what we can learn as leaders.   Lacking Integrity Not too many leaders would be saying they lacked integrity about themselves but that may not be how they are seen by their subordinates.  The organization may be zigging but we decide to zag.  We don’t agree with the policy, so

In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets.  I often ponder what does that actually mean?  I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic.  They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders.  Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan.  You joined a company for life and there was only one route for those who changed jobs and that was down into a netherworld of strife, insecurity and lower salary.  In the goode olde days you had to dodge the flying ashtrays thrown at you by your authentically enraged boss, endure their publicly delivered abuse and keep going. Yamaichi Securities going down in 1997, made changing jobs mid-career respectable for the first time for those who became unemployed through no fault of their own.   Can a boss be passive at the other end of the scale? No.  Bosses have

We have met them.  Thrusters, mad with power and hungry to control others.  Organisation insider politicians who spend all of their time sucking up to the powerful, while lobbying for themselves to be granted more and more status and authority.  The absolute nobody, who controls approval processes and who milks it for all it is worth.  The psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted intent on making our life hell, now that they have been promoted.  The mixture of leaders and power can be a powerful tonic and it can also be a toxic cocktail.  Let’s take a look at five power constructs for leaders.  Have you worked for any of these bosses? Which amongst these are you?   Authority power is the absolute refuge of scoundrels. They have nothing going for them individually, but they have three stripes on their sleeve and we have none, so they can control our lives.  They flaunt their position power and try to suppress everyone under them. They often hate their job and take it out on everyone they can bully.  Th

Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea.  When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader.  What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willfull negligence, before these problems went nuclear.  That meant micro managing everyone.  “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people.  The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating.  That was the age of the hero boss, who was the best at everything, knew more than everyone else and could do it all.  That won’t fly today because technology has made business so much more complex.   Back in 1971 Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted, “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention”.  This is where we bosses are today, with hand held devices which keep us permanently connected through the flood release valves of the internet.  We are time