• The Leadership Japan Series

  • 著者: Dr. Greg Story
  • ポッドキャスト

The Leadership Japan Series

著者: Dr. Greg Story
  • サマリー

  • Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
    © 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved.
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あらすじ・解説

Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
© 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved.
エピソード
  • Is Japanese Charisma The Same As Western Charisma
    2025/04/23

    I met the owner of a successful business recently. He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction. So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange. It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful. Why was that my expectation? Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent. He was totally different to what I expected.

    He had no personal power at all from what I could see. One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others. He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming. It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader? Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t have crossed the road to meet any of them.

    Position rather than personal power counts for lot in Japan. You meet a lot of people here with big titles and pretty much no personal firepower. That is not to say there aren’t charismatic, powerful leaders here. Mr. Nambu who founded the massive Persona organisation is a very charismatic person, who has tons of personal power. He has nearly 20,000 employees spread across his 67 subsidiaries and 11 affiliates. I know him personally and he is very good at dealing with people, both high and low. He started the company while he was still at university, so he is a rare bird in Japan, to take a start-up to serious stardom and himself to billionaire status.

    What is the difference between some of the successful Japanese I have met and the nobodies leading many firms. When we teach leadership, we make a point of differentiating it from management. Managers make sure the processes are running on time, cost and at the required quality. Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction and build the people. By this definition most Japanese leaders we meet in business would be classified as “managers”. Japan is a country of detail, long term planning, caution and perseverance. You can go a long way on the back of that line-up and many do.

    My new acquaintance is a manager I would say. I am guessing that he fell into the business he is in, rather than it being the product of strategic planning. What a contrast with Jordan Wang. Jordan is the Dale Carnegie franchisee in Sydney and took the business over two years ago from basically nothing growing it very quickly to a substantial size. I was attending his talk to the Franchisee Association on how he runs his business.

    His planning frameworks were very sophisticated. Because they started with basically nothing, he said, he had to come up with a road map. He spent some serious time studying the various frameworks out there and then adjusted them to his reality. Over the next two years he shaped and crafted those frameworks into a formidable machine, to help run his business. One of the very experienced and successful American franchisees commented that “I am feeing less smart” after listening to Jordan. I know exactly what he means, because I too was blown away by Jordan regarding his thinking, energy and that word – charisma.

    In Japan, trust is a key requirement for retaining staff, gaining clients and remaining successful. This is the same everywhere, but somehow Japan just brings a much great intensity to the word. If you can gain trust with others, you can build a business here. Over time you can build it, if you happen to have chosen a niche or a sector that is growing and profitable. Being high on trust and low on charisma is no impediment to success here in Japan.

    So when you meet a Japanese leader and they are a fizzer in the charisma stakes, don’t necessarily write them off. Look at their numbers, particularly staff numbers as an indicator of how much credence you should attach to them. In my experience, few Japanese excel individually, but put them together in a group and they are most formidable. To keep the group together, their leaders need to have been able to build the trust. The other question you need to ask is have they been able to sustain this over decades? If they have, then you may have a business partner in front of you, even if they seem grey, dull and boring.

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    11 分
  • Leadership Silk Purses From Sow's Ears
    2025/04/16
    The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”. I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here. I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t. The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive. If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer. Why would you bother with B or C players, if you can afford A players? What do you do though, when you are running a small to medium sized company in a tough market, with thin margins and lots of competitors? Being a leader, able to recruit the best talent, isn’t the same requirement as being at the sharp end of the stick, where you have to create something out of nothing on a daily basis. We have to take D players and turn them into C players and take C players and turn them into B players. Maybe we can even create the odd A player, given enough time and consistency. In theory, this sounds all very plausible and straightforward. Good so far, but how do you bring your talent alchemy to the forefront? Leaders are pretty busy, so who develops these D, C and B people? It stands to reason that the sales section heads or sales department heads are not sales A players either, so their sales role modelling is a limiting factor. The leader has to be highly selective where they put their time and effort. Pumping a lot of work into someone, to see them walk out the door is heartbreaking, mind numbing, costly and depressing stuff. Adjusting expectations is a big factor in leadership. Trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle takes time. So we cannot expect new people to be producing results any time soon. Having a really good record of salespeople results is a start. Over time, you can build up averages, so that you can know what is a reasonable expectation, for a certain point in time. I have a spreadsheet that tracks all the salespeople from ground zero. This way I am comparing salesperson against salesperson, quarter by quarter. I know what a first year average revenue result is and so forth, year by year. Knowing this is a big help, because I don’t load up new people with too much pressure. In fact, it gives me the ability to encourage them. I can tell them that I am not expecting them to hit the moon straight out the gate. The first year is a giant learning curve and I want them to do their best and that will be fine. By taking away the pressure, they can fit into the team, absorb the culture and begin their training. A players are expensive, so bosses want results immediately, to justify the big bucks they are paying them. Fair enough, but the rest of us need to tread a different path of patience and encouragement, to gradually mould the new people into performers. The other thing we need to do is inject ourselves into the mix and work on developing talent. We cannot leave it all to our direct reports. Even though we are super busy, we need to have some regular personal interaction with the new team members and need to keep close tabs on how they are going. We need to create the time to coach them. We cannot be there all of the time, but we have to select precise interventions to help them keep moving forward. Maybe we can do thirty minutes early mornings, a couple of times a week, to work with them as a group. We also have to scale for their ability to absorb pressure. Some are robust and others are more delicate flowers. We need to adjust our time expectations for how long it will take to get everyone up to speed to handle the pressure to perform. A players are already forged in the furnace of high performance, so they are application ready. The balance of getting cash in the door every month to pay the bills and being patient with people, is a high wire act that leaders have to learnt to walk. It is easy to get this wrong and fall to your demise and see the business go backwards or even down. There is no road map here either, because every case is different, every group of individuals is different. You have to play the cards you can afford and not spend any time wishing to be dealt a better hand. The country may be going to hell in a basket, but salespeople are in high demand. When hiring salespeople people, I am constantly astonished at the prices other companies will pay for a warm body. Very challenged E players, with no experience, are getting offers that make you want to cry. That is the market. We are all going to be constantly faced with this struggle of how to develop people we can afford, in an already overheated hiring market, that will just get worse. The demographics are not on the leader’s side here, as the lack of young people coming into sales drives up the price. This will become the sales era of ...
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    11 分
  • Namby Pamby Kids Today and Tough Love Leaders
    2025/04/09
    Years ago I inverted the pyramid and promoted the best salespeople to become the branch leaders. The existing branch leaders were shuffled around to new branches and they provided the grey hair and the credibility needed by the older rich clientele, but didn’t have responsibility for driving revenues anymore. They were moved because if they had stayed in the same branch, they would have undermined the authority of these “upstarts” recently promoted. The revenue generation responsibility was shifted from guys in their 50s to a 60/40 mix of younger guys and gals, taking the average age down to 35 years of age. It was a revolution in Japanese retail banking. Not all made the transition from selling to leading but most did. This was the American Dream brought to Japan. In this brave new world, a young woman could become a branch head at the age of 35. That was previously unimaginable. The impact on recruiting talented, bright kids out of the best universities was profound. We were bringing on board young people who were incredible and they chose us over the bigger more powerful competition, because they saw a new future here in Japan for themselves that hadn’t existed before. There were many reasons for instituting this revolutionary change, but one of them was the generational divide between the older male branch leaders and the younger people they were responsible for. Like me, they had all grown up under the tough love school of boss supervision. When this is how you were raised in business, it is extremely hard to break free of that and try something unfamiliar and different. The intentions are always good and were to make the younger staff better. The issue had become the style of communication to achieve that. Straight talk, for many in my generation, means tons of critique, criticism and maybe even verbal abuse. That is what we got from our bosses, so we are passing it on down the generations. The younger people today though have a lot more options than we had. They have compliance systems, staff surveys of bosses and a fundamental change in societal attitudes working in their favour. The demographic decline in the numbers of young people means there is a strident war for talent going on, as companies try their best to find enough young people to hire. The young are a finite resource in a sea of strong demand. That changes the power equation substantially from when I was a kid. We were all assured we were quite disposable. In the modern era, criticism has to be replaced with words of encouragement. Bosses have to adjust their expectations. This sounds simple, but it is confronting. I remember once calling one of my younger staff and I left a message to call me back. There had been some internal staffing changes and I wanted to assure them that everything would be fine. I also wanted to gauge how they were was feeling about the changes. No call back, but later I did see a text message to my phone that said they were “not mentally ready to speak with me yet”. I don’t know about you, but for someone brought up on tough love, that statement seemed so soft, indulgent, entitled, namby-pamby, no guts and divorced from reality. I tell you I had fire and sparks coming out of my ears and eyes immediately I read their message. I was furious. I could never imagine I would say such a thing to the President of the company, if I were a junior employee. If the President left a phone message saying “call me back” then I would drop everything and make that call as soon as I got that message. We lead a different generation today. In their mind, there was no problem with brushing off the President, because they weren’t ready to have that conversation. I eventually spoke with the staff member and accommodated some concerns they had and all was good and resolved - for them. I wasn’t resolved though. Maybe I should have just left it, but I couldn’t. I had to address their phone message to me. This person was talented and I didn't want to lose them, so I knew I was walking on a tightrope. My tough love upbringing had their “immature, naïve, stupid, unacceptable” comments stuck firmly in my craw. I told them quietly, calmly but firmly, that if they ever got another message from me to call me back, then they should do so pronto. If they couldn’t manage that, then they should find another President to work for. They could do that easily by the way, because they are in the zone of high talent demand. Where do we draw the line today though? I know the way I was raised in business wasn’t the most ideal and that I am a hangover from a bygone era, but I am still here and still leading. How much crap do we have to put up with from this younger generation? I would guess a whole lot more, certainly more than we anticipate or want. There is no finite answer, but clearly our method of communication is going to have to ...
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    13 分

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