The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

Bruce Lee Nailed This Leadership Flaw   I am a big Bruce Lee fan, but I never thought of him as a purveyor of leadership wisdom. Lot’s of interesting stuff gets posted on Facebook and sure enough the following was attributed to Bruce Lee, “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer”. Did Bruce really say that? Who knows, but it is a great piece of insight about leadership anyway, so let’s roll with it. Leaders habitually fail to learn from their subordinate’s answers and also overestimate their ability to share their personal wisdom with the team. No one is listening much to each other.   Bosses aren’t learning much from foolish questions, because well, they consider them foolish and of no value. When we have brainstorming sessions in companies, the boss is the judge, jury and executioner of aspirant ideas. The boss runs the session because they are the boss aren’t they. This is interesting and here is a suggestion for all the bosses out there - don’t always be

Japan’s Galapagos Syndrome Still Alive And Well   The description of Japan, as similar to the remote islands of Galapagos off the South American coastline is often quite apt. The fauna and flora of the Galapagos Islands are unique and have become so, through their splendid isolation from the outside world. When the ruling Tokugawa family declared death for anyone coming into Japan or leaving Japan, with the exception of the Dutch down on tiny little Dejima Island in Kyushu, the country went into isolation from the rest of the world. Many things in Japan still continue in isolation despite the country opening up to the world, thanks to the arrival of American gunboats in the 1850s.   In 1992 I was posted in Nagoya, for four years, launching up a totally new operation there. I found it tough. We were trying to get Australian products and services into the Chubu region market, but the mental resistance was quite strong. Initially l thought it was because we were foreigners. I discovered that even those Japanese

Japan Must Globalise But Where Are The Global Leaders?   The consumer demographics for Japan are crystal clear. The domestic market is shrinking and will continue to do so into the future. The population is aging, so there are opportunities serving that market today but it is a shrinking market over the long term. Once this baby boomer generation passes then the revenue problems will really hit hard. Basically japan is not a growth market in most sectors. Japanese corporations recognise this and are expanding their operations overseas. Part of this process is the globalisation of these companies, as they realize their staff have to become more global in outlook and capability for the organisation to survive.   Junsuke Usami, a partner at L.E.K Consulting wrote an interesting article on this issue, which was published in the Diamond Harvard Business Review. To have capable Japanese leaders who can run a global business is a reflection of Japan’s difficulty in producing strong leaders in the first place.   He n

Questions As Incoming Missiles   The new President, a super star with a brilliant resume, started attending our Division’s weekly meetings. We were between divisions heads, because he had just fired the old one, so he took it upon himself to see what was going on. We were all pretty excited to be in the presence of corporate royalty. The first meeting, though in a room a bit small for all the people crowded in, seemed to be going okay as people reported the results. But then things went a bit crazy. When he didn’t like what he heard, he would explode with rage, going from zero to 100 in a nanosecond. His fury was so intense and his questions were brutal and lethal. If you were on the receiving end, your spine simply decalcified on the spot. Every week the meeting was like this.   Here is something I noticed. Never sit in front of an enraged President. Whoever sits in front is going to get both barrels between the eyes. It happened every week, time after time. Get there early and always sit at the absolute end

Effective Team Building Is Not A Snap   You are sitting there at your desk beavering away as usual when you get the phone call. Suddenly you are called upstairs by your boss to their office. You are informed there is a new project needed and that “we want you to head up a new team to get it done. There is a lot counting on this and time is of the upmost urgency”.   This is good and bad. You are already very busy with a bunch of other work not yet completed and this project sounds very high risk. If the project doesn’t get done well and on time, you know your head is on the block. On the other hand it is a chance to shine and show the big bosses you are more than ready to join their elite company.   The only problem is you cannot do the whole project by yourself. Fortunately, you have been given permission to pull together the team you need to get the job done. In a perfect world, like you see in the movies, you would be selecting the all star team of high achievers and the most motivated dudes and dudesses on

My Japanese Managers Are Duds      The foreign firm sets up in Japan and they hire an experienced senior Japanese President. Things roll along, although with Japan operating like another planet. VIPs visit. Meetings are held, plans are made. The results never seem to come to fruition, despite the passing of time. “Japan is different” is trotted out each time to explain. Finally headquarters snaps, fires the extremely well paid Japanese President and send in their own guy or gal to turn things around. The newbie arrives into a heavy fog engulfed landscape, where nothing seems quite right. Three years fly by, the fog is lifting a little, but no real progress has been made. The newbie is transferred out and another one is dispatched to Nippon.   Now in the process of trying to reattach Japan to the mothership, for the first time, headquarters has better information about what is going on in Japan. It doesn’t seem to be helping much though. The new President surveys the team and finds major gaps, especially with

Me, Me, Me Leaders   Getting to the very top of a company is a zero sum game where you either make it or you don’t. There are winners, losers and wannabees. For the highly ambitious, the efforts start early. Often from childhood they have self-selected themselves to become the leader. To earn their spot at the top they have to show they can shine, as they make their way up through the ranks. They shine all right. In fact they shine all the light on themselves to make sure they eventually get the top seat. They are selfish, self centered, self-promoting and out of date.   The world of work has moved. Sheer will, dominance of others, baring of teeth and the pointed display of claws isn’t as important as it once was. In the modern firm, we need to see teams working well together, both internally at the section level and at the broader level of a total company-wide team effort. This requires an aspirant for the big job to have a greater degree of big picture vision and strong sense of holistic responsibility for

Japan's Big Challenge   The demographic challenge for Japan is looming on the horizon.  The decrease in the numbers of young people is permanent. What companies will face is a shift in power from the company side to the employee side.  The young entrants into Japanese companies will start to realise they are in super demand.  This will end lifetime employment as we currently know it.  If you meet someone from a Western country who has spent their entire working life with the same company you are always surprised.  This is because we move between companies and this is unremarkable.  Japan will become like this in the future. The issue in Japan will be the two Rs - Recruit and Retain.  How to be an attractive employer who young people want to work for will be the test.  Today with social media there is a tonne of information about companies which allow the young prospects to check us out.  They will particularly be looking for is information on how their supervisors will treat then. Once they get inside the com