The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Hard Talk Fallacies   You have to tell people how it is or you will lose power and authority. If you swallow what you want to say, you will diminish yourself. If you avoid hard conversations, you will have less influence. You need to tell them exactly how you are feeling. This was the tenor of the advice coming from a communication “guru”. While listening to this, I thought this is absolutely going to fail in Japan, if not every where.   This guru is appealing to an American audience, so there is the temptation to just dismiss this as typical excess. There was however an earlier icon of communication skills named Dale Carnegie. An American from (show me, don’t tell me) Missouri, who started training (brusque and brash) New Yorkers in 1912. Despite being from the mid-West and teaching in the apocryphal rude capital of the universe, Dale Carnegie concluded that direct hard talk would fail. Both men appealing to the same audience, but approaching the subject from diametrically opposing stances.   Dale Carnegie’s