『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
  • Salespeople To Avoid

    Salespeople To Avoid
    2026/10/18
    A long career in sales does not automatically make someone a professional salesperson. In Japan, I have met experienced representatives who launch into a polished product pitch without asking a single question about the buyer. That is not consultative selling. That is brochure delivery with a business card. How can you recognise an unprofessional salesperson in Japan? A salesperson who starts explaining a product before understanding your needs is displaying a serious gap in professional selling skills. The first test is simple: do they ask what you are trying to achieve, what constraints you face and why you are considering a purchase? Or do they reach for the brochure? In business-to-business sales and financial services alike, a presentation cannot replace discovery. I once met two experienced representatives from a major multinational insurance company in Japan. They had come to complete cancer insurance paperwork, but then moved straight into an annuity cross-sell. Neither asked about my investment objectives. Years of employment do not guarantee years of learning. A salesperson can repeat the same weak routine for two decades and still call it experience. Do now: Listen for thoughtful discovery questions before allowing a product presentation to begin. Why must salespeople ask questions before presenting products? Questions uncover the buyer's goals, risks and decision criteria, allowing a salesperson to recommend something relevant rather than simply available. The insurance representatives walked me through dollar-cost averaging, charts and a quiz about hypothetical investment returns. I answered correctly and received congratulations. Lovely. But where were the questions about retirement timing, family circumstances, existing investments and financial priorities? Nowhere. With an annuity, these considerations are central to suitability. In corporate sales, the equivalent questions concern business objectives, decision-makers, budgets and implementation risk. Japan's emphasis on relationships does not excuse weak diagnosis. In fact, careful questioning can demonstrate respect for the customer's circumstances. If the buyer has to do all the analytical work, the salesperson is not adding much value. Do now: Require discovery of objectives, constraints and decision criteria before recommending a solution. What should financial product salespeople know about fees and fund structures? Salespeople must understand the costs, underlying investments and limitations of the financial products they present. When I finally read the annuity brochure myself, I discovered a fund-of-funds structure and details of fees, including ongoing charges. I asked the two representatives about those costs. It became obvious they were unfamiliar with that section of their own brochure. That is astonishing when fees directly affect what a customer ultimately receives. The same principle applies beyond financial services: software subscriptions, training programmes and industrial equipment all carry costs and conditions buyers need to understand. Product knowledge means more than memorising the headline benefits. It includes being able to explain what the customer pays, what they receive and what might change over time. Do now: Test whether representatives can explain every material fee, condition and product limitation. Does twenty years of sales experience guarantee competence? No. Twenty years in a sales role may represent deep expertise, or merely one year of inadequate habits repeated twenty times. The representatives I met were seasoned, not newcomers. Their confidence and tenure could easily have reassured a buyer who did not ask detailed questions. Yet they skipped fundamental discovery and could not explain material charges. This distinction matters for sales directors across Japan, whether they manage multinational teams or domestic small and medium-sized enterprises. Seniority, loyalty and familiarity with the company are not substitutes for demonstrated ability. Nor should managers assume a long-serving salesperson has mastered consultative selling, negotiation or customer qualification. Skills must be observed, not inferred from age or length of service. Do now: Evaluate actual selling behaviour rather than using tenure as a proxy for capability. How can sales managers identify weaknesses in their teams? Short, realistic sales role-plays quickly reveal whether representatives ask useful questions and genuinely understand what they sell. Give a salesperson a realistic buyer scenario, then watch what happens. Do they begin with a product explanation or investigate the situation? Can they explain the commercial details without hiding behind marketing material? Can they handle an unexpected question about costs or suitability? A role-play need not become a theatrical production. Ten minutes of observation can expose habits that annual sales figures may conceal. Managers should also review discovery notes, coach ...
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    12 分
  • 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
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