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The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

By: 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 Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • 365 Win the Deal In Japan Without Losing the Relationship Part One

    365 Win the Deal In Japan Without Losing the Relationship Part One
    Aug 24 2025
    Our image of negotiating tends to be highly influenced by the winner takes all model. This is the transactional process where one side outwits the other and receives the majority of the value. Think about your own business? How many business partners do you have where this would apply? For the vast majority of cases we are not after a single sale. We are thinking about LTV – the life time value of the customer. We are focused on the proportion of our time spent hunting for new business as opposed to farming the existing business. Where do you think the trust barometer would be located, if we started “outwitting” our clients in our negotiations? Especially in Japan, where trust is such a crucial element and everyone is focused on long term relationships. So success in negotiating in Japan will be very different and it will definitely be a win-win approach. Fine, but do you have a consistent process to apply to your negotiations? Often we do it the hard way without a roadmap or we forget parts of the process. We are all rank amateurs anyway, because the amount of negotiating we do is limited and the size of the deals are usually modest. Have we got the basics covered? Here are four steps we need to cover: Analysis We begin by clarifying our own position. What is it we want to achieve and then we identify alternatives we can live with, if we can’t achieve all that we wish. We also look for ways to add value in areas other than price. Price is only one lever in a negotiation although most people get stuck on the idea it is the only lever. We want to understand the client’s positions and interests and the background reasons driving their approach. This is especially useful when looking for alternative solutions, as we might have something that is valuable to them, but not a great impost to us. We also should look to reframe the conversation to avoid confrontation. There are trigger words which can rapidly inject emotion into a logical discussion and we need to know what those words are for the opposite party. We can then phrase things in ways which is not incendiary. Presentation When we do public speaking we know that if we rehearse what we are going to say, it will go much better. When the American political leaders have their famous televised debates, they practice taking difficult questions so that they will appear unruffled and credible in their answers. Doing the same thing before a negotiation makes sense doesn’t it. Have well prepared what you are going to say and how you will say it. Have a colleague hit you with “toughies” – questions you would rather not have to face thank you very much. “More sweat in rehearsal, less blood in negotiating” should be the mantra. Like lawyers do when getting ready to go to court, we should also prepare the opposite sides case, the client’s case, as though it were our own. This gives us an insight into the likely approach they will take and we are then much better prepared to deal with it. Price isn’t the only thing so we should be ready to present added value alternatives to simple numbers. Because we have rehearsed their position, we can more effectively link our solution to the client’s positions and interests. Bargaining At some point there will be a gap between offer and acceptance and this is when we start trading things we want, for things they want. Bargaining down at the bazaar, in the souk, at the local flea market and in the B2B business world are entirely different. Our object is a sale with a nice regular, perpetual re-order attached to it, rather than “a one and done” outcome. So at the start we decide our ideal, realistic and fallback positions. We do this through the prism of our current demand, local and global business conditions, future business trends, price point profitability and our cash burn through rate. Negotiating tactics will be applied to us but the key is to respond logically rather than react emotionally. Easier said than done! However if we did our preparation well then we should be rock solid. We should be looking for win-win so we are trying to make it easy to agree with us and hard to disagree. Agreement Japan isn't much for legal contracts compared to the West. Most of our business is done without any contracts, as we agree verbally and then carry out our word and they carry out theirs. If we are talking about huge amounts of money however, then absolutely contacts will be needed. So even if a formal contract is not involved, we need some specification of all points of agreement. Put every key item in writing, be it the form of a quotation, invoice or just an email capturing the joint understanding of what is going to happen going forward and how much money is involved. To make it very clear, create a checklist and schedule for fulfillment. These four steps are not rocket science, but remember we are mostly ...
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    12 mins
  • 364 You Can’t Win A Knife Fight With A Slide Deck

    364 You Can’t Win A Knife Fight With A Slide Deck
    Aug 17 2025
    Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, shareholders, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation in Japan and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled unwashed and disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and uncomfortable. We still have our message to get across but we have to make some adjustments to head off trouble. The essence of the issue is disbelief. The audience, for whatever reasons, simply don’t believe what you are telling them or they just don’t trust you, regardless of what you tell them. The first casualty of this type of speaking engagement has to be big, bold statements. In less tense situations we might be throwing these types of statement around with gay abandon and not face much resistance from the audience. If what we have said gets brought up in the Q&A, we bat it away without breaking into a sweat. No problem, we have this one! In more fraught circumstances, those big statements will get us hammered, maybe even as soon as they are issued, with no regard for waiting for the Q&A, as the interrogation gets underway immediately. By the way, if there is an intervention by someone in the audience, we should redirect them to ask that question in the Q&A, which is where we will handle all questions. This stops your flow being interrupted and the proceedings being hijacked. We need to be more circumspect about the claims we make. We need to introduce ideas surrounded and buffered by evidence. Instead of saying, “this is how it is”, we need to say, “according to the research, this is how it is” or “according to the experts, this is how it is”. We swiftly and subtly slip off to the side of the attack and let the third-party reference take it between the eyes, rather than ourselves. We need to wrap up our statements in cotton wool and preface them with comments like, “as far as we know…”, “according to the latest information…”, “to the best of our knowledge…”. In this way, we are not holding ourselves up as the oracle, the all-knowing, all seeing sage, unburdened by limitations of self-awareness. We are making ourselves a small target, harder to attack and providing many escape loopholes to leap though, should we need to. We need to lead with context and background. Making statements and drawing conclusions, before we get to the evidence part, is ritualistic suicide as a speaker facing a hostile crowd. We need to take a note from the pages of the Japanese language grammatical structure. Unlike English and most European languages, in Japanese the verb comes at the very end of the sentence. This is a great metaphor for doling out the evidence first before we get to the punchline. In Japanese, we don’t know if the sentence is past, present or future oriented, if it is negative or positive, until we get to the end of the sentence. That means we have to sit there and absorb all of the context, background and evidence before we can make a judgment about whether we agree with what is being said or not. This is what we should do with a hostile audience – load them up on the details, the data, the evidence, the testimonials, the expert statements, before we venture forth with what we believe to be true. We deliver this deluge of facts piecemeal, so that the audience is taking in the information, processing it in their own minds and jumping to conclusions about what they have just heard. Our object is that the conclusion they have jumped to is the very same one that we have reached, based on the same information. It is almost impossible to disagree with our context. They may not agree with our conclusions from our understanding of the context, but the context itself is usually inviolable. Before we go into Q&A we must publicly announce the amount of time available for questions. It is going to get heated and we don’t want to appear like a cowardly scoundrel beating a hasty retreat, because we can’t take the rigour of investigation of what we are saying. By having stated the time available at the start, we can simply refer to it later and say, “we have now reached the end of the fifteen minutes for question time” and go into wrapping up the evening with our final close. Hostilities may commence immediately we begin to speak, so we have to be mentally ready for that. We also need to switch our presenting tactics to account for the pushback which will come. By making ourselves as small a target as possible, it becomes much harder for any enemies in the audience to successfully attack us. If they are going after you, they are definitely not your ...
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    11 mins
  • 363 The Truth About Death by Overwork in Japan

    363 The Truth About Death by Overwork in Japan
    Aug 11 2025
    So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to mental and physical exhaustion and the associated stress that piles up, until it totally overwhelming. So the real source of death from karaoshi is stress, not physically working too hard. Just where is that stress coming from? It is coming from two sources: the individual’s inability to deal with the stress of long hours, long commutes, and no time for recovery, driving them to depression and ending their own precious lives. The other source is management incompetence, to allow that amount of stress to be experienced by their staff in the first place. It is compounded by power harassment of those who struggle to keep up with the output requirements. In my view, management irresponsibility is the prime killer. If there were no cases of exceptional stress buildup, then the staff wouldn’t need remedial actions at all. The long hours worked, long hours of public transport commutation and high amounts of pressure from bosses are the real problems. The hundreds of extra hours of overtime worked are being logged for no justifiable reason. In many previous cases, such as Dentsu, the company tried to hide the extent of the hours being worked. Management was party to the process, all the while knowing it was wrong. They were also aware of previous cases where people cracked under the strain of too little sleep and permanent tiredness and took their own life. They knew this was a possibility, but did nothing to alter the work flows. This is criminal and that is what the courts found. Dentsu was fined 500,000 yen by the judicial system. However, was justice served? The young woman involved was 24 years old when she jumped off the roof of the Dentsu dormitory, to kill herself and end her stress and depression. Many would consider a fine of 500,000 yen insignificant. The management didn’t control the work flow. If there was so much work on, why didn’t they bring in either more full time staff or part-time or contract workers to help? This is what bosses are paid to do – get through the work and apply the required resources to do that. The system didn’t see it that way. Presumably, they expected the staff to put in the ridiculous hours to save the company the money needed for salaries for new or additional staff. We can talk about there being a culture of long hours in Japan and it is true. Dentsu was picked out in the 1970s by Time Magazine as a company of fearless samurai salarymen, toiling ridiculous hours for their bosses, so this is not a new development. They were held up as a model to contrast with their flabby Western counterparts. These long hours weren’t needed then and are not needed now. It is being driven by a pathetic white collar culture of low productivity. The work expands to fit the time in Japan as per Parkinson’s Law and so working hours elongate to suit. If bosses were capable, they would be seeking improvements in productivity to get through the work in less time. Is Japan not capable of being highly productive? The kaizen and kamban production systems in manufacturing are well known in the West as methods of achieving maximum efficiency by blue collar workers. The irony is that one hundred meters away, staff in corporate offices are working at super low levels of efficiency for the same company – the contrast is large. How can the same senior managers entertain these two contradictory ideas in their minds, at the same time? No problem for them because they have compartmentalised the situations. “This is how we do it around here and so we will keep it going just as it is. The factory system is different to an office, so there is no relevancy”. That is simply lazy thinking. Efficiency in process, in workload distribution, in systems sequencing, in checking methods, in approvals are all areas that can be applied to office work as well. What is being kept alive by mediocre company leaders in the way of standard Japanese corporate practices? Here is a list of leadership crimes for which no one is ever reprimanded. No clear daily prioritised individual goals, poor time management, meetings too numerous and too long. Painfully slow decision-making required to get everyone on board. Disengaged staff turning up to get paid and not motivated to be bothered to innovate. Poor communication, no real coaching, demotivating performance ...
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    12 mins
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