The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Managing Up   Why do we want to manage up? All the brains and good ideas in an organization don’t exclusively aggregate to the top of the hierarchy. In fact, one of the depressing aspects of becoming a leader, with responsibilty for others, is that you are taken away from the front line.  This is especially the case if you have been enjoying working with clients and in your new vice-regal role, you can only do that osmotically, through others in your team. You rapidly find yourself out of date with what is happening in the market and the nitty gritty of what is going on in the front line.    You see the macro numbers and can see trends, but you don’t see what is fully behind those numbers. This means that the people at the bottom will always have a perspective on the business that is denied to the boss. This is okay, as long as the boss is tapping into the knowledge and viewpoint of those in the field, those on the front line.  In a perfect word that would be the case, but in this time poor world, that is not

Mentor Others To Help Yourself   The title sounds terrible doesn’t it.  So selfish and self-serving.  The truth is we don’t mentor others because we are too busy and we can’t justify the distraction from concentrating on our own business.  That may be true, but we all know that great aphorism about “work on your business, not just in your business”.  This idea invites us to climb out of the mud, blood and chaos of daily battle in business, to check we have our ladder up against the right wall. When we look at the situation of others, we become geniuses, but somehow we are too close to our own micro world, to apply the same level of insight.  Mentoring gives us a chance to think without the internally induced pressure and therefore to see things which we are often blind to.   Finding people to mentor isn’t hard.  Within your company or business circles there will be no shortage of people who can use some additional help and will be open to learning from someone more senior and a lot more experienced.  “You can

Five Phase Practical Creative Thinking   More, faster, better with less sounds ideal, but if you are continuing to do the same things, in the same way, then the sadly, results will be the same.  That means we need to be introducing changes. The creative quotient in change has the capacity to really lift our game.  Are we maximizing the total power of the group to come up with creative interventions, which will impact our performance?  Usually the boss is barking out orders like a mad pirate or is shredding ideas from the group, as they begin to hatch.  This destroys any individual motivation to put up any further ideas and plunges the future of the organisation into idea darkness.  Not ideal.   We all know that the ability to think creatively, analyse problems and opportunities in new innovative ways are critical organisational skills, which are still underdeveloped here in most companies in Japan.  We want new discoveries, better ways of doing things, reduced costs and improved performance, but we often defe

Coaching People Out Of Downward, Negative Spirals   You are resilient, sturdy, capable, independent, hardy, self-motivated, constantly pushing and challenging the organization to go forward.  You don’t need anything in terms of social recognition or internal worth validation from others.  You are the leader and you get the job done.  Bully for you. The issues arise with those working for you, who are not like you.  They may be younger, less experienced, less educated, less confident and less convinced they can change the world through working at your firm.   Leading a bunch of clones is easy, because everyone gets it and they will file into line on command. We never get this situation though, unless we are in the elite military units perhaps, where a fearsome pruning process has been applied to whittle the punters down to the right group of super high achievers.  What we get is what the person or people before us hired and which the company can afford.  We may be able to hire a few of our own selections while

Celebrating Wins When Doing Business In Japan   We imagine we are celebrating our wins, but are we really?  I think about myself and I realize, I am not doing it.  This is a good reminder for myself, that I should be doing it more often. Japan is a highly risk averse culture, so when we ask people to step out of their comfort zone, they are hesitant to do so.  Most people don’t like change, so there needs to be encouragement and recognition to do so. Avoiding risk, responsibility and accountability are gold medal winning traits on the part of most Japanese people. This is their risk averse nature coming through.   We are all looking for innovation and progress and that means doing things we aren’t automatically good at, it means mistakes and possible failures.  All of these things get penalized in Japan. No wonder people like doing the same and safe routines they are familiar with.  We have to think about how to reward people for stepping up and stepping out.    That means praise and recognition and celebrati

Handling Mistakes In Business In Japan   Mistakes happen.  The important thing though is how we handle mistakes in Japan?  How do you handle mistakes by your staff?  We want innovation , we want improvement, we want people stepping out to grow the business.  The problem in Japan is making a mistake is taken very seriously and bosses will berate staff for errors and colleagues will be less than supportive. Consequently, staff have learned to avoid all possibility of making a mistake by not taking any risks and by avoiding all additional responsibility and accountability.  We want the opposite, but the problem is people are reluctant to do that.  When mistakes happen everyone is watching to see how the boss will react and handle the problem.  They are all thinking what will happen to me, if I make a mistake.  When they see their colleagues being hauled over the coals, they judge that is something to avoid. The best way to avoid that, is keep doing the same old safe things and don’t try anything new.   So we nee

  Time When Doing Business In Japan   Time is life, time is money and time is your business.  Business decisions are glacial here in Japan but buyer expectations of you regarding your response and follow times are exceedingly high.  Tokyo especially bustles along.  You see it in the mornings. I catch my subway train around 7.15am in the morning and to my astonishment I see people dressed for business, running through the subway station.  Why are they running at 7.15am in the morning? Who knows, but it just reinforces that things are moving fast here in this crazy capital.  The pace of life is fast so we have to be very well organised to keep up with buyer’s expectations.   It is so much harder to be well organised today.  Emails are hitting our inboxes like a tsunami, just wave upon wave of new emails, without remorse and without relent.  You cannot call any one anymore either because they are in meetings, everyone is in meetings.  You know your email will get drowned in their inbox and you cannot get them on

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