The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Praise or Flattery: Doing Business In Japan   Japan is awash with praise but it is praise more on the flattery side of the equation.  When you get here and you speak a few words of Japanese they will quickly tell you how fluent in Japanese you are.  You use chopsticks at the restaurant and you get praised for mastering this tricky set of implements.  This is all flattery, so don’t believe a word of it.  Japan has been a high density living environment for thousands of years, so flattery is grease to smooth the wheels.  They have learnt that the way to increase harmony is to smooth out all the rough edges, so this is where praise and flattery come in.   It happens in our countries too.  I am fascinated by American culture.  Winston Churchill noted the US and the UK were two countries separated by a common language.  Australia and America look similar but we too are quite different culturally.  I was reminded of this recently when an American businessman I had just met for the first time at a networking event i