Couverture de The Presentations Japan Series

The Presentations Japan Series

The Presentations Japan Series

De : Dr. Greg Story
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 Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.Copyright 2022 Economie Management Management et direction
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    • How To Be A Star in Business Interviews

      How To Be A Star in Business Interviews
      Jul 28 2025
      Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment. These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business. More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts. I have been on both sides of the microphone, so let me share some observations which may help you prepare for your interview. Chamber panels and podcasts are usually not “gotcha” interviews, as we will encounter with some journalists doing media interviews. Generally, we are going to be treated well and it would be rare that the interviewer really went after you. Having said that though, we have to expect the interviewer to want to dig down deeper into something you have said. This can be of two basic varieties. One is a high level statement you made where the context and detail is obvious to the speaker. This may not be obvious to the audience though, so the interviewer will seek more detail and clarification. In this case, that is not a problem, because we have the depth of mastery of the subject. The other variety is a statement that may be accepted wisdom or it might be something we have said without giving too much thought to it. This is when we will get into trouble, because as soon as the interviewer starts to dig in, it becomes plainly obvious we don’t know all that much about it and out pours fluff instead of substance. The answer here is to talk about things you have experienced, read about in detail, have researched deeply or where you have listened to experts. This sounds obvious, however we don’t know where we will go with the questions and we can be drawn to stray into areas where our intellectual coverage is pretty thin. There is nothing wrong with honesty. Just say, “I don’t have much to say on that subject because I am not an expert in that area. However something I do feel passionate about is…”. Don’t just end it with telling the audience you don’t know much, because we are starting to damage our personal brand. Avoid leaving the conversation hanging in the air with us having admitted we are babbling on about stuff we don’t know too much about. Immediately segue into an area where we are knowledgeable and talk about that. Always seek the questions in advance. With media people they will do that, but often they have a couple of silent assassins ready which they will hit you with unexpectedly, to throw you off balance, to gain their “scoop”. Business panels and podcasts are usually not like that. Generally, for panels, they will let you know, in general terms, what is the broad discussion they are looking for. In the case of a panel, it is unpredictable where the conversation will move, but at least there are broad rails bounding the subject matter. Again, it always better to say you don’t know, than trying to snow the organisers or the audience. Instead make a comment about some aspect you do know well and preserve your expert status. For podcasts, you should expect they will have a set list of questions and you should get those in advance. If the interviewer says something like “I let the muse guide me”, then I wouldn’t recommend joining that podcast, unless you are massively confident about the subject matter. Generally, there will be prior episodes, so you can get a sense of whether you are in the presence of real genius or a total nutter. Often there will be a pre-meeting, to go through the episode theme and for them to get a sense of what sort of a guest you will be. You can also get a sense of who they are too. Prepare for the questions, but understand you won’t be able to read from notes. The pace will move too fast for that. You can glance at your notes, so it is better to have them arranged for easy reference, if you indeed need to do that. Just having mentally calibrated the questions is usually enough. Remember you are there because you know about the subject, so it will be easy for you to speak about it. That is often the real problem. We do know a lot about the subject and we talk for too long and say too much. Media interviews are an area where the more concise you are the safer it is. Panel discussion hosts don’t like guests who want to hog the limelight, so they will unceremoniously cut you off, effectively signalling to the audience that you lack self-awareness. Podcast hosts may just edit the hell out of you. There is a balance, but being concise comes across a lot better than rambling. If what you say is a bit too circumspect, the interviewer will draw you out further. If you hear yourself talking too much, then you probably are, so you need to conclude your remarks on that point and stop. Rehearse your remarks based on the questions. Remember these are public occasions and just as you would rehearse for a public speech, you need ...
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      13 min
    • How to Develop Persuasion Power

      How to Develop Persuasion Power
      Jul 21 2025

      One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.

      The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.

      When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.

      Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.

      We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.

      The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.

      We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.

      If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.
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      11 min
    • What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong

      What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong
      Jul 14 2025
      What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders. I know this because the same requests keep coming up. This is across industries and companies and it is consistent. Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information. They can really pack a lot into a few slides. When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, without much structure or clarity. Somehow the bosses have to work out the key points for themselves, because the staff’s job focuses on accumulating hoards of data and then putting it all up on screen. The presenter is almost invisible, has low energy, speaks in a quiet voice you can struggle to hear and blends well into the wall paper. This doesn’t work so well in international meetings and Japan looks weak and ineffectual to the rest of the far flung company world. We are battling two giants here. One is the educational system and the other is Japanese culture. I earned my Masters Degree here in Tokyo, so I have seen up close and personal what a high school education prepares you for and what universities do with that raw clay. An argument could have been made, prior to the advent of the internet, that the ability to memorise vast quantities of information and regurgitate it on command was a serious capability. We can find any thing very quickly today thanks to search engines, so having to memorise gobs of stuff isn’t as important as it once may have been. I see it in my son’s education when he was at international High School here. They were required to have laptops and everything was done online. His generations’ issue is there is too much information. How do you find the best and correct data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Young people are digital natives, but they are all drinking from the firehose of all data every recorded, sitting just a few clicks away. We teach our students to start at the end. Define in as short a sentence as possible, the most important key message you want to impart. This is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be brutal with yourself. You have to eliminate all the nice to have, all the interesting to have and refine it down to the must have. Just throwing up a lot of data on screen doesn’t require as much thinking, as refining the data into the gold nuggets for the audience. Discerning the key message then allows us to build the structure for the argument and to align the necessary evidence in order to be convincing to our audience. The first words coming out of our mouth have a powerful role. Everyone seems easily distracted today, have miniscule concentration spans and are quickly bored. So we need to say something that really breaks through that wall of indifference and grab their attention. There is no point launching that blockbuster opening in a squeaky, unsure, timid little voice. People will be flying for their phones to escape you. No, we need a strong voice, standing or sitting tall if online, when we kick things off. We have to be oozing confidence. “But Story san, my English is so poor, I have no confidence”. This is another trope we often hear. Here we have Japanese perfectionism, no defect, no errors and no mistake culture colliding with the Education Department’s failed efforts to teach the population English. Don’t accept that excuse. No one cares about linguistic perfection in business meetings, except the Japanese staff when they have to speak in English. Give them the “no grammar needed” escape jail card for the meetings, to give them permission to speak without fear and let the rest of us work out what it is they want to say. We are used to this and are all pretty good at it. Just being able to isolate the key take away and deliver that in a confident manner will be a revolution to business meetings where Japanese have to present. Not having to wade through all the dross to understand the key point will be a relief. Having one idea per slide will be a life saver for everyone – make this the iron rule for Japanese presenters. This forces the selection of only the most important information to be shown. The result will be a much clearer messaging effort and greater clarity around what exactly is that message. Confidence sells the message, so the delivery has to be sold in that manner. Rehearsal is critical for Japanese speakers and so is coaching. This applies to whatever language they are presenting in, because you can guarantee the issues will be present in both languages to a great extent. When giving feedback to anyone, only look at two elements and tell them what they are doing well and then tell them how they can do it even better. This will build confidence and create a momentum that will maximise capability. What does all of this cost? Nothing, so let’s get to it.
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      12 min

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