The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Leaders: Get Off The Chems     Our cave dwelling ancestor past is still with us today. Rather than sabre tooth tigers though, we are reacting to anyone who argues with us or seeks to deny us what we want. The chemical cocktail in our bodies ignites passion, anger, mouth-before-brain outbursts, cursing, putdowns, sharp rebukes and killer comebacks. Fleet of foot, our reactions saved us from being lunch for predators but today that same nifty speed can get us into trouble with those around us.   Common sense is not common. Crystal clear communication goes unheard. The obvious is not obvious. There are no shortages of things in our leader world, which can set off a chemical chain reaction in us, that we can come to regret. The six-step devastation cycle plays out like this: Event, Interpretation, Emotional Response, Physical Response, Attitude Response and Effect. Event triggers can be mistakes; stupidity; something said, overheard or reported; interactions with others or a business crisis.   Our speed is astoun

Dream It   “We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do”. This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future. Up until the 1920s, fate and God’s will were the more common explanations for what would become of us. Psychology studies in the USA began to drive the idea that we could control our futures to a much greater degree than we thought, by controlling our thoughts. Not so remarkable today, but this was a brand new idea back then. The problem though is we still haven’t quite found the escape velocity to blast us out of our self-limiting beliefs about ourselves.   The decline in available well paying jobs following on from the Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 has had a broad impact around the globe. China’s ability to become the factory of the world, has meant that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the developed nations. Recent research is telling us that work

We Won’t Follow Bots     Basically your job is toast. There is a machine or there will soon be a machine that can do it faster, better and cheaper than you. Our skill set didn’t change much from the start of agriculture 12,000 years ago until the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century. This last 150 years has been busy. We have created a weapon that can destroy our race. Who thought we would be that stupid? Fifty years ago we didn’t believe machine translation of our complex language skills would get very far. Certainly it was expected that there would never be non-human intervention simultaneous translation. Also, fortunately, machines can’t pivot or anticipate (well except for IBM’s Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov in 1997).   Driving cars and trucks requires us, because it is such a delicate, detailed and difficult set of tasks. What a ridiculous idea to imagine replacing those cantankerous, aging Japanese taxi drivers and punch perm truckers here in Tokyo with a self-driving, self-navigating vehicl

Effective Project Management Rules   Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them. It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it is that we don’t actually do it. We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails, without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein.   Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations.   Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope. This often changes mid-steam. Know the customer’s requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it, and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed. Plan well. The plan will cover the scope,

REAL Leaders   We love acronyms! Our workplaces are thriving with them, such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes. They are handy though and this one REAL is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to combine evidence with pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on recent survey research we did in the USA We asked what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful. We are in the process of rolling this survey out globally. The REAL acronym is composed of these key elements – Reliable, Empathetic, Aspirational and Learner.   “Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice. “Managing upwards” is a buzzword for describing how to deal with one’s boss. It used to be called “sucking up to the boss” to get ahead. In the latter case, it means taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming other

Running A Foreign Business In Japan    Running your own business is challenging anywhere, but Japan adds a bit of spice to the broth. According to official statistics, 70% of Japanese companies are unprofitable. Business seems pretty simple at one level – constantly seek to increase revenues and reduce or hold down costs. To increase revenues you can find more customers, more repeater customers and raise prices.   Raising prices in Japan gets tough, when you are in the churning wash of decades of deflation and when there are always lots and lots of competitors. When the consumption tax was raised previously, the economy immediately plunged into recession, which indicates the price sensitivity of the populace. The Abe Cabinet blinked and gave up on the last scheduled increase out of fear of the consequences.   The usual way of differentiating yourself and justifying higher prices is through the added value you provide. Naturally, there is a major sales and marketing effort required to get that value message ou

Good Messages Delivered Badly     Seriously sad really. Our speaker had some excellent points to convey but due to silly basic errors, killed his organisation’s messages. I believe there is no excuse for this anymore. Today there is so much information available, so many role models, so much video instruction, so much access to insight, so much training, you really have to wonder how some organisations can do such a poor job.   The impressive thing was our speaker was delivering the talk in English, when that was not his native language. Actually, the level of English fluency was impressive. The speed was good, the pronunciation was fine, the speaking voice was clear. He came with a grand resume, part of the elite of the land, a well educated, senior guy. This was game, set and match to be a triumph of positive messaging and salesmanship. It was a fizzer.   I approached him after it was all over. Being the eternal Aussie optimist from the land of vast horizons, blue skies and wonderful sunshine, I thought our

Structured Project Planning     It sounds so obvious that we should have structures for doing our project planning. Projects are part and parcel of the fabric of work life and they constantly arise. It is surprising though that so many teams are busily working away with no structure whatsoever. The project team jumps straight into arranging the details of the project, without giving any thought to how the project should be approached in a holistic manner. Think about your own experience? Can you rattle off a structure for how projects should be planned, because you have always done it that way in the past? Probably not! I was the same. In one of my previous organisations, we actually completed a lot of projects and yet we never did anything apart from some very basic planning. We didn’t even think of them as projects – we just saw these activities as work.   So lets all get better organised. There are eight steps we can consider when we begin working on a project. Let’s assume that the team has been created,

Charismatic Leadership   Are you a perpetual student? I am always keen to learn and improve in my business, so I recently participated in a webinar on the subject of charisma in leadership. The set up for the webinar was impressive – the web landing page, the registration process, the videos, the automated follow–up emails. It was a Master Class in marketing and this part was worth it alone. The webinar itself was very good and the speaker was excellent. While listening, I was reflecting on charismatic leaders I have known and compared them to what I was hearing in the webinar.   There is an abundance of definitions on charismatic leadership. The definition proffered during the on-line session was uncontroversial and acceptable: emotional and intellectual engagement, inspiration to go the extra mile – all quite reasonable elements. Somehow though, they left me feeling vaguely unfulfilled.   Reflecting on charismatic leaders, what was it about them that made them so attractive? Of course they were highly skill

You Don’t Want Sales   Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib, “rat with a gold tooth” salespeople are the scourge of the earth. They are focused on your money and how quickly they can separate you from it. There are no barriers to entry or qualifications to enter this field of work. Riff raff need not apply but they do. Some will tell you anything, they live for today and like a shark, are constantly moving in order to feed. Snake oil purveyors to the naïve and trusting.   So, how do honest salespeople get anywhere when the image of the profession is so negative. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, people like Bernie Madoff, etc. - it goes on and on convincing us that we are permanently potential victims of scammers, charlatans and confidence men.   By the way, we are all in sales today. You might be in one of the “professions” but you are no longer above the fray. Lawyers are competing for clients just as voraciously as dentists, architects, engineers, doctors and everyone else who spent years

Hard Talk Fallacies   You have to tell people how it is or you will lose power and authority. If you swallow what you want to say, you will diminish yourself. If you avoid hard conversations, you will have less influence. You need to tell them exactly how you are feeling. This was the tenor of the advice coming from a communication “guru”. While listening to this, I thought this is absolutely going to fail in Japan, if not every where.   This guru is appealing to an American audience, so there is the temptation to just dismiss this as typical excess. There was however an earlier icon of communication skills named Dale Carnegie. An American from (show me, don’t tell me) Missouri, who started training (brusque and brash) New Yorkers in 1912. Despite being from the mid-West and teaching in the apocryphal rude capital of the universe, Dale Carnegie concluded that direct hard talk would fail. Both men appealing to the same audience, but approaching the subject from diametrically opposing stances.   Dale Carnegie’s

How To Be A Much Better Leader   “Born to lead” is nonsense. Many things shaped that person in order for them to achieve credibility with others. Of course, we can become a “leader” as part of our company designated hierarchy. We sit somewhere in an organizational chart above others, with various reporting lines elevating us above the hoi polloi. We know many people with that august title of “leader”, who we would never willingly follow in a million years – pompous, tiresome, incompetent jerks!   Can we become someone who others will follow when all the paraphernalia of leadership pomp and circumstance has been stripped away? At work the definition of a leader is fairly narrow: they manage processes and build people. There is leadership more broadly embraced outside of work – parent groups, hobbies, volunteer organisations. Often these non-work related positions become the sordid playgrounds of amateur politicians. People who cannot command respect at work, but who have the spare time and energy to manipulate

Ancien Regime Corporate Leaders   Sport is a popular source of inspiration for corporate leadership. Coaches attend off-sites and make good money telling executives how to be better motivators. Sports journalist Simon Kuper recently made an interesting observation in his column in the Financial Times about famous football coaches falling into decline, supplanted by younger, more innovative rivals. These superstar coaches were the original innovators, but they ran out of gas. Well not all of them. Almost as an aside, he flagged the difference between the shorter longevity of the “innovators” and those more hardy types who excelled at “people management”.   This is an interesting observation because often we surge through our careers based on our ideas, innovation or technical expertise. In Kuper’s article, the age of 40 was singled out. The planets start to align and leadership hopefuls begin their move to the very top. In my native Australia, historically, you were not thought to be a real man until you reach

Drucker On Leadership   Peter Drucker has this great quote. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and under performance. Everything else requires leadership”. In this modern day and age, why do we still encounter these three horsemen of the apocalypse of organizational dis-function? Each signals its own raft of challenges, magnified even further when operating in Japan.   Friction is a tricky one in Japan for foreign bosses, because so often it is subterranean. Power struggles, factions, proxies, turf, ego all come into play here but not so overtly. Influence is achieved through access to key people more often than over the bodies of enemies. Apart from bosses disciplining subordinates, screaming abuse at colleagues isn’t acceptable in Japan. The problem here is getting the issues out on the table for resolution more than anything else.   The age old remedy of out of office discussions is usually where the boss finds out what is really going on, as opposed to what was thoug

Attitude Control   We can control 100% of our attitude. Yes, but often we don’t. There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control. So you would think we would all be brilliant in this area. We aren’t and so why do we have problems?   Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude. We mentally re-run the movie in our minds of things we regret or events we actually don’t want to remember, but do anyway. No amount of self-discipline seems to work, shielding us from the past. We seem drawn to flashbacks and re-living the past episodes where we fell short or failed.   We are really creative too. We don’t just allow the past to wipe out our positive attitude, we inject the future in there as well. We project forward and start imagining all sorts of failures and issues we will suffer, before they ever even happen or arrive.   The combination of past realities and future possibilities can be a powerful mix

Dojo Business Lessons   I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses. Here are my musings assembled from my 46 years of training in traditional Japanese Karate.   Entering the Dojo The Dojo is the ultimate equalizer. Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller, Maybach or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that Dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else. You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, social status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities.   In business we forget this and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities. It is always amazing how many politicians there are infesting companies. We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded. If the politicians control the top positions then the corporate fish will rot from the head and the busin

Why Leading Project Teams Is Tough   Projects are too common. Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly. We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach. We certainly don’t apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechanics of the execution. Why is that?   Poor leadership and lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team launches forth rocking and rolling with no strategy and little expertise.   Often, there is no existing documented planning process in place. This can be rather ironic because often the projects are repeated or very similar projects are undertaken. Templates and structure are missing so everyone just wings it, making it up as they go along, re-inventing the wheel.   The goals of the project are often vague. This is a lack of direction from the top leadership to those

How To Get Good Ideas     We find it frustrating when we have good ideas or suggestions but all we receive is rejection or even worse criticism of our ideas. Part of it can be the culture of the organization. I was listening to some friend’s war stories about working at a major global cosmetics brand, where the culture was purposely made combative. I laughed when I was told the Meeting Room was called the “Confrontation Room”. Actually it was a nervous laugh, because that is probably the last place I would want to work. Now I have been studying traditional Japanese Karate for the last 46 years, had a 20 year career as a competitor and so the “combative” part isn’t intimidating for me. What horrifies me is the damage that type of culture and thinking does to the potential of the organization.   I was assured that despite the toxic nature of that organization, it was still very successful and the Darwinian approach produced winners. This strikes me as a very ancient way of thinking and completely out of touch w

Stop Killing Your Sales   What we say and how we say it matters. It matters in life, in families and in business- especially in sales. Salestalk is very semantics driven. By the way, the classic Hollywood big talking salesperson is an archeological artifact, a dusty relic, now banished to the tombs. Today, salespeople have to be articulate but not glib, concise not flowery, evidence based not barrow-boy spivs.   Japan presents a challenge with developing salespeople. Invariably, they are the undereducated graduates of OJT or On-the-Job Training. This will work for certain technical themes but not for the broader art of sales. Attempts by foreign corporates to rectify this problem are often laughable. Bosses who don’t speak Japanese or don’t have a sales background or even worse lack both, send in the English speaking instructors from the corporate APAC hub, to dole out the sales medicine. It is always snake oil.   Sales training for salespeople must be based on the reality of selling to clients in the client’

Japan’s 3 No Ys Society   Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist, made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society. He referred to Japan’s current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and yaruki (guts). What does this mean for business and for our companies if we are staffed by young people without these three Ys? As leaders, how can we reverse this trend and produce more engaged teams? Is it too late already?   Diligence has a strong pedigree in japan. Retainers in samurai society were trained to be ready to die for their lord anywhere, anytime. In the pre-war period the majority of people lived in non-urban areas, where agriculture was the main pursuit. This required you to pull your own weight as part of a group effort. The harshest punishment was ostracism or murahachibu, which meant no cooperation from the group and possibly death the result.   In the post-war period, previous firebombing of cities and industrial centers meant Japan had to drag itself up from the ashes