The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Delegation In Business In Japan   We know that delegating tasks is important but we have tried it in the past and found it didn’t work well, so we have given up on it.  Why didn’t it work well?  This usually because of the way we do the delegation.  We just dump the task on someone and tell them when we want it, as we gracefully slide off into the mist.  We turn up at the designated production point to find it hasn’t been done or has errors or has been taken off on a complete different direction to what we expected.  The timing means it is too late or panic stations to try and fix it by the deadline. We blame “delegation” the process rather than ourselves.   So we start saying dumb things to ourselves like “it would be faster if I do it myself”.  We do this because we don’t want to invest the time in teaching someone else how they should be doing it.  This is a big mistake because if we keep doing it this way we will never be able to delegate anything.  There is a big opportunity cost here, because we can’t f

Japan Can Be Brutal In Sports And Business We recently had a blatant example of poor sportsmanship here in an American Football game between two traditional University team rivals.  It gained massive media coverage because it was unusual.  I think it is pretty clear to everyone that Nihon University American Football coaches Inoue and Uchida told linebacker Miyagawa to injure the Kansei Gakujun University Quarterback. In their press conference they said he misunderstood their orders. Probably what they meant was injure the Quarterback, but not so blatantly that it has gone viral. Sports in Japan is still feudal in some areas and violence toward players is tolerated by the institutions because they want to win and gain prestige. Isolated incident you may be thinking?  Think again. Do you remember a few years ago when the Sakuranomiya High School basketball captain chose death by suicide, rather than face another demeaning day of 30 slaps in the face from his Coach Komura. The coach “got results” so his coachin

Stress In Business In Japan   We know that stress is a killer.  Stress is something that sits there under the surface and it effects our health and our performance.  It runs deep and can well up in us.  We are not fixing it or diminishing it, we are just suffering it.  Japan can be stressful place in business.  Decisions take a long time and the client is never on your timetable.  You expected that payment, but it didn’t turn up.  You discover that the invoice had to be in by the 15thof the month, but no one bothered to tell you that.  You are not getting paid and now cash flow issues arise.   Currency movements have now had a strong impact on your profitability and this wasn’t factored in fully, when you did the business plan.  Regulatory barriers are making it hard to supply the market.  The buyers prefer the devil they know, to the angel they don’t know, and that angel means you.  So how do you break into this market when nobody knows you? Then you have the problems of running your own team.  People are ge

Worry In Business In Japan   There are so many things we have to worry about in business. Do we have enough cash flow to pay the bills, will we have enough left over to get to the end of the next month.  Can we meet salary, do we have enough to pay our taxes, can we meet our supplier’s payment invoice requests.  The one thing that will bring a business down and eliminate it is not enough cash flow.  Once that becomes insufficient it is game over.  So we need to preserve cash and that means you need a really accurate tracking system.  You do not want any nasty surprises about cash flow.   We worry about our clients mix.  Do we have the right balance of those we are farming, that is to say the regular buyers of our products or services.  They may not grow much but they are regular and sound repeat business.  We also need new clients though to replace the ones we lose and to expand the business or we need existing clients to spend more with us. This is the gross revenue side of the business.  As we all know, you

Longevity In Business In Japan   Longevity means a lot in Japan.  People who are risk averse like the fact your company has been around for a long time. They know there is a certain degree of track record there.  They sense you are stable, predictable, credible, reliable – all indicators that you are a low risk choice of business partner.  If you are a new entrant how does that work for you?  You have no track record, no credibility, nothing to reduce the risk of having you as a potential supplier.   Your firm may be new to Japan, but perhaps you have an established track record in your own country. I previously ran an Australian bank here in Japan and that company had been around for 150 plus years.  We leveraged that track record here in Japan to establish the levels of trust we needed.  That was our longevity to satisfy Japanese buyers.   In the case of Dale Carnegie Training, we always talk about the fact that we started 106 years ago in New York and 55 years ago in Japan.  We do this to show we are relia

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

Dealing With Crime In Business in Japan   Crime is going to be a feature of any society.  There are going to be different elements of crime – activities that affect your personal safety, fraud coming from outside your firm and fraud coming from within your company.  Organised crime the Yakuza are well established here.  They even have their offices with their own shingle, announcing which gang they are. They are not as strong as they once were, but they are still a force.  The chances of a foreign run business having trouble with the Yakuza is pretty low. For cultural and language reasons they find dealing with us too hard.  There are plenty of local Japanese they can exploit and that is a much easier to do.    They run prostitution, drugs and extortion.  There have been media reports at different times of a Japanese company President or employee being killed by Yakuza, because he wouldn’t pay them off or whatever. A new law introduced a few years ago that held the gang boss response for the crimes of his und

Face Is Very Important In Business In Japan   If you enjoy a good debate, well Japan is not the place for you then. In Western culture debating is part of the education system.  You may have been on the debating team in High School or may have participated in debates during English class.  But what is a debate?  It is an argument, where one team tries to outsmart the other, one-up them, show they are intellectually superior, more intelligent and more persuasive. It is a smarty pants culture. Our love of oratory goes right back to the Greeks and continues today.  We admire people who are articulate, witty, clever and are amused when someone successfully one-ups the other party.    I was raised in Australia and it is a macho culture where boys are constantly trying to one up each other. We do this in sports, especially extreme sports or seeing who can jump off the highest riverbank into the muddy river with all the dangers there of submerged tree trunks and hidden rocks, etc.  We do this in banter.  Always tryi

Getting Change In Business In Japan   Getting change anywhere is a difficult process, but Japan is a special case.  Often in business, we represent the change.  We are the potential new supplier and that means a change. They have been doing business with someone else and we want them to stop doing that and do business with us instead. There are many currents underpinning Japanese culture and its resistance to change. I have been training in traditional Japanese karate for 46 years and part of that process is learning set sequences called kata.  These are fixed moves that cannot be varied in any way.  There is one way to do the movement and our job is to replicate that same movement thousands of times until we have perfected it.  There is no possibility of doing it a different way - in other words no change is possible.    This is a powerful metaphor for many things in Japan where there is only one way of doing things and it cannot be varied.  This is prime change resistance in action.  I find this at home too

Getting Staff Engagement When Doing Business In Japan   According to our global research, there are three critical issues that determine the level of engagement and one key trigger point to getting engagement.  This research was duplicated here and japan and showed the same trends. The relationship between the staff member and their supervisor or boss is an obvious make or break point for getting high levels of engagement. What is your relationship with the team?    Often we are promoted on the basis of our ability, our smarts and then we find we are leading people who are not like us.  We think that being smart is enough but actually our EQ or Emotional Quotient is much more important than our IQ when it comes to leading and engaging the team. When we start a new business there is so much pressure and we are so time poor, we often forget about the impact we have on the people around us.  We forget to thank them, to encourage them, to coach them.   As the old saying goes, we don't leave companies, we leave bo

Recruiting Staff In Business In Japan Demographics are accentuating a talent shortage in Japan.  The supply of young people has halved over the last twenty years and is on track to halve again between now and 2060.  The number of young Japanese studying overseas peaked pre-Lehman Shock in the low 80,000s a year.  It dropped down to low 50,000s and has crawled back up to around 60,000 going overseas to study each year.   The flavor of their overseas experience has also changed.  Many more are going for short stays, so their level of English isn't as good and their cultural immersion isn't as deep.  This is a function of cost and also the greater concerns for personal safety in a world where terrorists roam major cities, killing innocents without warning.  This trend to go abroad less and for shorter periods is ironic because the minds of the corporate titans in Japan are now more focused globally.  Their companies  need young Japanese staff who can handle the world beyond the seas surrounding Japan. They know

How To Brainstorm In Japan   Japan can only copy! This once upon a time was what we heard about Japanese innovation.  It was used disparagingly as a dismissal of Japanese capacity to innovate.  Well Japan is excellent at copying for sure.  There is a level of attention to detail here that is mindboggling.  Part of the issue was that over centuries of isolation Japan had become incredibly skilled in kaizen - small steps of improvement. The breakthrough ideas were happening somewhere else. This is an important observation, because when we are trying to come up with new ideas, we have to remember that we don't want just ideas that improve on what we did in the past, if possible, we want to leap past our competitors and go on to the next stage of development.   Japan is not the only place where we have seen this phenomenon.  Nokia was innovating by producing better and better phones.  Steve Jobs introduced an innovation, the smart phone, that killed Nokia off and let Apple dominate the global market.  The rental

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years. In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decis

Execute On My Shiny Idea, Now!   A genius idea springs into your head and off you go to share it with your staff member.  Well share isn’t quite the right word.   Actually, delegate is the right word because you want them to do something for you.  The staff member is sitting there thinking , “I want no part of this” and the excuses start pouring forth.  This is a simple thing – you are the boss and you want something done and they get paid to do what you need them to be doing.  Or so it seems.  Japan is an interesting place.  It has quite a clear hierarchy established throughout the society in terms of wealth, position, rank, age and seniority.  So why do staff ignore what the boss wants?   Well they won’t outright refuse all that often, although that can happen. They are usually more subtle than that.  The societal reluctance to confront others, particularly those in positions of authority, run deep.  Instead they will put your passion project on the back burner and then conduct a war of attrition around not

Ownership Versus Dictatorship In Leadership   Leading people can be easy, if you want to be a total dictator and just order everyone around. The way of doing everything has to be specified and the detail has to be scrutinised within an inch of its life, all the time.  All the ideas have to come from you and all you want is passive acceptance from the team. They are the arms and legs and you are the brain, in super command mode.  Actually there are plenty of leaders like that in Japan. The control part works just fine because you are in control of everything.  This means your entire day is broken up in firing out orders and then checking to make sure they were executed in the exact format you had specified. This uber control method has a lot of consistency and predictability to it.  Compliance heads love this environment, because it is all about controls. This is the Theory X leader that Douglas McGregor wrote about in his study of motivation.  The leader working on the basis of strict controls and severe pena

Leading Your External Partners In Japan   For many companies it makes no sense to fund their own sales force in Japan.  The money, expertise and time available within the organization is insufficient to the task, so a partner is required.  This could be an equity partner or a distribution alliance.  The penalties for getting this wrong though are high.    Poor partner selection can ensure your product or service never gets anywhere in Japan by design. The big player looks attractive as a distributor, but they are partnering with you to kill your business. They have a preferred product or service and the last thing they want is for you to disrupt the market.  The best way to do that is partner with you and then just idle the business.  They know it will take you years to figure it out, if you ever do.   When the agreement period for the partnership is set long, the pain is sustained and there is nothing you can do about it.  Desperate or ignorant company representatives sign long contracts with insufficient mi

The Focused And Disciplined Boss   Intellectually, we all know what we should be doing and how we should be doing it, but that isn’t how things work in the real world is it! We have turned our email inboxes into giant parking lots for stranded emails, which get no attention, but are parked there ready for action. We know we are wasting a lot of time in meetings, but the meetings are always scheduled for an hour where everyone follows Parkinson’s Law and allows the work to expand to fit the time. We have papers, magazines we will never read but aspire to and reports piled high on all flat surfaces within arms reach. Another parking lot for the parentless paper trail.   So much time is spent on organising the logistics of leading today. Sorting through stuff to decide what to do about it, rather than actually doing it. We file emails or electronic documents and then can’t remember where we filed them so spend time hunting them down. We keep shunting paper around from one spot to another, because we can’t commit

Leader EQ In Short Supply   Intellectually we get it. We know that what we think influences what we feel about something in our business. We know that how we feel influences our behaviour in the workplace. Knowing this is great but acting within that knowledge is the hard bit. You see it all the time.   I have a friend, a leader, who gets very emotional and the gloves come off. The results go south one month or one quarter and the boss is savagely chewing everyone out. The pressure from above about the poor results is turning that nice boss into a monster. Something which was vital to a project has not been done, because someone else down the line decided they knew more about it than the boss and stopped it happening. An action was specifically requested to be done on a particular day and it wasn’t done. The boss publically explodes with anger and frustration.   This whole construct is selfish. It is all about me, me, me as the boss. The buck stops with the boss, so naturally the boss is self-interested in ge

Soft Versus Hard In Leadership   I was invited to speak about Japan at an HR Forum in Taipei recently. The audience was made up of very senior executives from a wide range of industries. There was quite a lot of discussion about the challenges of leading firms today. The central debate which emerged though was about being hard on results and hard on the people to get those results or to be more people focused? What struck me was the central concerns raised were not culture related, nationality or geographically bound. This tells me these are central constructs which can apply anywhere.   Too tough an attitude toward our staff breeds sycophancy, “yes men”, timidity and stasis. When you combine this with a firm run as a family business, the problems just multiply. “Bakabon” is a nifty Japanese term to describe the idiot offspring of the company founder. They are talentless, but they have the right surname, gender and they will take over the business, when the founder dies. Talented people don’t want to work in