『The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show』のカバーアート

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

著者： Dr. Greg Story
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For succeeding in business in Japan you need to know how to lead, sell and persuade. This is what we cover in the show. No matter what the issue you will get hints, information, experience and insights into securing the necessary solutions required. Everything in the show is based on real world perspectives, with a strong emphasis on offering practical steps you can take to succeed.copyright 2022 マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 経済学
エピソード
  • The Big Perspective Is Needed When Presenting

    The Big Perspective Is Needed When Presenting
    2026/10/04
    The podium is a powerful place for powerful ideas. Your audience has no idea where you are going to take them. For thirty or forty minutes, you are effectively master of the universe, omnipotent over everyone seated before you. The question is: what are you going to do with that remarkable opportunity? Too many business presentations stay safe, practical and buried in detail. They inform, but they don't elevate. A powerful presentation should occasionally take the audience above the weeds and give them a bigger perspective on their company, industry, country or even the world. Why Do Business Presentations Need a Bigger Perspective? Great business presentations do more than transfer information; they challenge audiences to think more deeply and differently. Businesspeople are naturally pragmatic. We talk about revenue, customers, costs, market share, productivity, people and performance. Nobody expects the CEO to mount the podium and deliver a fiery call to storm the Bastille. The danger is that this practicality makes our presentations too safe. We report what happened, explain what is happening and perhaps predict what will happen next. Everything is locked down and neutral. That may be professionally safe, but intellectually it can be pedestrian. If we never challenge ourselves to think beyond the immediate details, we won't challenge the audience either. Do now: Ask yourself what larger issue sits behind your immediate business topic and whether your audience would benefit from seeing it. Why Do So Many Executive Presentations Get Lost in Detail? Executives often spend vastly more time arranging slides than developing the one or two big ideas their audience should remember. PowerPoint, Keynote and presentation templates encourage us to think sequentially: slide one, slide two, slide three. We become consumed by charts, graphs, bullet points, fonts and the order of the deck. The presentation then becomes a collection of information rather than an intellectual journey. This problem is particularly easy to encounter in complex organisations, where presenters need to satisfy numerous stakeholders and demonstrate command of the detail. Yet senior executives usually need more than detail. They need perspective. The speaker should be asking: What does this mean for our industry? What might happen next? What danger are we failing to see? What opportunity are we overlooking? Do now: Before rearranging another slide, write down the single biggest idea you want your audience thinking about after you finish. How Can Speakers Turn a Company Issue Into a Bigger Business Idea? Take the immediate company problem and deliberately elevate it to the industry, societal, national or international level. Suppose your company is struggling to recruit younger employees. You can certainly discuss your recruitment figures, retention rates and employer branding. But why stop there? The bigger issue might be demographic change, changing attitudes towards careers, competition for talent or the future relationship between employers and employees. The same applies to sales, technology, leadership and customer service. A declining sales number can open a discussion about changing buyer behaviour. A technology investment can raise questions about how artificial intelligence will alter the division of labour between humans and machines. You are still talking about the real world. You are simply viewing that reality from a higher altitude. Do now: Take one problem in your presentation and ask, "What bigger trend does this represent?" Does a Big-Picture Presentation Risk Becoming Too Philosophical? Yes, if you overdo it. One or two substantial insights are usually enough to elevate a business presentation without turning it into a soapbox performance. We don't need every presentation to whir off into some philosophical tangent far removed from commercial reality. Our audiences came for something useful, and we should give it to them. The key is proportion. Spend most of the presentation dealing with the practical subject at hand. Then, at carefully selected moments, pull the camera back. Show the audience the wider landscape. This is where a speaker can ask what the current issue means for the industry in five years, how developments overseas may affect the local market, or what an apparently small change tells us about a much larger transformation. Then return to the practical implications. Do now: Identify one or two moments where you can deliberately shift from the immediate issue to the wider significance and then come back. How Can Presenting Improve an Executive's Own Thinking? Preparing to speak about the bigger picture forces executives to escape the everyday problems that normally dominate their working lives. Everyday business can bury us in the everyday, every day. Emails, meetings, budgets, personnel issues, customers, deadlines and targets consume our intellectual bandwidth. The podium gives us an excuse to rise ...
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    10 分
  • Coach For Team Japan Excellence

    Coach For Team Japan Excellence
    2026/09/27
    Japan's younger generation wants something different from the traditional boss. They need leaders who can explain the WHY behind the work, communicate persuasively, develop careers, build confidence and act as personal coaches. Sounds easy, doesn't it? We should be able to knock that lot off before lunch. Well, maybe not. The problem is that Japan no longer has the luxury of getting this wrong. The country's demographic decline means younger employees are becoming an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. As of March 2026, Japan had approximately 36.2 million people aged 65 and over but only around 13.3 million under the age of 15. For Japanese companies, retaining and developing young talent is moving from being an HR issue to becoming a business survival issue. Why do Japanese bosses need to become coaches? Japan's shrinking workforce means companies cannot afford to keep losing talented younger employees because their managers do not know how to lead, develop and coach them. Competition for younger Japanese workers will intensify as the population declines. The OECD continues to identify severe labour shortages caused by Japan's ageing and declining population, particularly among SMEs and non-manufacturing businesses. You can already see the impact in construction, retail, convenience stores, hospitality and food service, where companies increasingly depend on non-Japanese workers. This completely changes the role of the boss. Commanding people to do things may have survived in an era when labour was plentiful. It becomes considerably less effective when good employees have alternatives. The modern leader has to persuade people that staying, learning and developing within the organisation is worth their time. Do now: Stop thinking of coaching as an optional HR activity. In Japan's labour market, developing and retaining people is becoming a core management responsibility. Are young Japanese employees really leaving companies so quickly? Yes. Roughly one-third of recent Japanese university graduates leave their first employer within three years, making early-career retention a significant management issue. The latest Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare figures show that 33.8% of university graduates entering employment in 2022 left within three years. For high-school graduates, the figure was even higher at 37.9%. The rate also varies enormously according to company size. Among university graduates working for organisations with fewer than five employees, 57.5% left within three years. For companies employing 1,000 people or more, it was 27.0%. Money, job content, career opportunities and workplace conditions all matter, of course. But the immediate boss has enormous influence over an employee's daily experience. Young employees are constantly asking themselves: Am I learning? Am I progressing? Does anyone here care about my future? Do now: Treat retention as something managers influence every day, rather than something HR discovers during the exit interview. Why are many Japanese middle managers weak at coaching? Most Japanese middle managers were never systematically taught how to coach, so organisations often reproduce yesterday's management habits through OJT. On-the-job training is deeply embedded in Japanese corporate life. OJT itself isn't the problem. The problem is what happens when the person delivering the OJT has never received professional leadership or coaching training. The previous generation teaches the next generation what they themselves were taught. If you had a brilliant mentor, excellent. You were lucky. But hoping that every manager magically develops coaching capability through experience is not a management development strategy. The traditional Japanese boss was often expected to be technically competent, experienced and knowledgeable. The modern boss needs those qualities plus communication, persuasion, feedback, career development and coaching skills. That is a substantial shift. Do now: Companies should explicitly train managers in coaching rather than assuming that being promoted automatically equips someone to develop other people. How should a Japanese manager coach a younger employee? Effective coaching starts by identifying the skill required, agreeing on the desired outcome and making sure both the manager and employee own the goal. First, identify what capability is actually needed. There may be twenty possible things the person could improve, but trying to coach everything simultaneously is hopeless. Prioritise. Then picture the desired result together. What does good performance look like? What is the gap between current performance and that outcome? Next comes attitude. Different people are motivated by different things. What gets the boss excited may completely underwhelm a twenty-seven-year-old team member. This is where trust becomes critical. How well do you actually know the people working for you? What are their career ambitions? What ...
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    12 分
  • Sales Objection Handling Mastery

    Sales Objection Handling Mastery
    2026/09/20
    Sales objections are a normal part of selling. The problem is not that clients object. The problem is how salespeople react when they hear the objection. There is often a moment of brain fog. Then the salesperson recovers and springs into action — usually the wrong action. They start arguing with the client about why the objection is wrong. That effort normally goes nowhere. Sales objection handling is not about winning an argument. It is about understanding what is really preventing the buyer from moving forward, deciding whether that obstacle is legitimate and then determining whether you can solve it profitably. How should salespeople respond when a client raises an objection? The first response to a sales objection should be to investigate it, rather than immediately trying to answer it. What the client initially tells us is often just the headline. There is usually a much longer explanation sitting underneath it. Think of the objection as the tip of an iceberg. We can hear the few words sitting above the surface, but we cannot yet see all the reasoning underneath. This is particularly important in B2B sales in Japan, where buyers may be cautious about expressing every concern immediately. If we jump in with our magnificent answer to the first objection, we may be solving something which isn't actually stopping the sale. Ask questions. Clarify what they mean. Encourage them to explain their thinking. Do now: Don't fight the objection. Expand it until you understand what the buyer really means. How do you uncover the real sales objection? Keep asking what else is preventing the client from proceeding until you have exhausted their list of concerns. One objection may conceal another. Price might be mentioned first, for example, when the real concern is risk, internal approval, confidence in the supplier or reluctance to change. After uncovering the objections, ask the client to rank them. Which issue is the most important? Which one really prevents them from saying yes? Now we have something useful to work with. At this point, make a judgement. Is the highest-ranked issue a genuine and legitimate objection? If it doesn't sound convincing, you probably haven't reached the real problem yet. Keep digging. Salespeople often feel pressure to start selling immediately. Resist it. Diagnosis comes before prescription. Do now: Uncover all the objections, rank them and work on the highest-priority genuine objection first. Should salespeople always try to overcome an objection? No. Some objections cannot — and should not — be overcome if satisfying them would make the business unattractive or unprofitable. Once we understand the genuine objection, we have another judgement call to make. Can we actually provide what the client wants? Can we deliver it in the way they want? Can we do it at a price which makes commercial sense? This is where sales discipline matters. Some buyers engage in what I call "sport negotiating". Winning the negotiation becomes almost as important as buying the product or service. They want to see how far they can push the salesperson, particularly on price. We don't have to play. I would rather build a long-term relationship with a repeat buyer than lock myself into a transactional relationship with someone who constantly bullies suppliers. Do now: Before overcoming an objection, decide whether winning the deal is actually worth winning. How should you handle price objections in Japan? Protect your pricing because once you lower a price in Japan, that reduced figure can quickly become the new ceiling for future negotiations. If you decide that some movement is possible, you then have to judge how far you are prepared to move. Never casually surrender your best price. If you immediately offer the lowest possible figure, you leave yourself nowhere to go when the buyer pushes again. And they may push again. The objective is not simply to close the transaction. The deal still has to make financial sense. This is particularly important where your pricing reflects local Japanese costs rather than a foreign headquarters' assumptions. We recently encountered this with a global automotive company. Their overseas headquarters wanted Japanese pricing reduced to fit their global model. Yet the programme involved was already heavily subscribed at the existing Japanese price. There was no compelling reason to surrender the economics. Do now: Establish your walk-away point before negotiating and preserve enough margin to negotiate without destroying the value of the deal. How can you overcome the objection that a client is happy with their current supplier? You need clear differentiation and a low-risk way for the buyer to experience that difference for themselves. This objection can be tougher than price. Japanese companies often stay with suppliers they know and trust. Changing introduces uncertainty, and the perceived consequences of making the wrong choice may outweigh the perceived ...
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    13 分
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