The Leadership Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
  • Summary

  • 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.
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Episodes
  • 584 Breaking Leader Bad Habits - The Struggles of Health, Fitness, and Stress We All Face
    Nov 6 2024
    Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day? Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate. Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress? Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day? Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work? Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep? Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress? Well, I have pretty much described myself here. Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space. Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work. I do a lot of pontificating in my content about what to do and how to do it, so I can imagine I can come across as Mr. Goody Two Shoes pseudo perfect. This time I will use myself and my failings as the mirror for you to think about yourself and what you are doing if you share these same attributes. Ironically, as I sit here writing this, I have been sitting at my home desk writing my weekly blogs for the last three hours and haven’t once stood up. I know just sitting is bad, but I get into a concentration zone and I forget to stand up. Right, I am going to use a timer with an alarm and set it so that I stop what I am doing and stand up and walk around at set intervals, a bit like the pomodoro method of twenty-five minutes work, five-minute break and then after four pomodoros take fifteen minute break. Eating less is a choice. Leaving parts of the meal unconsumed is a choice. Another irony. I am sitting here in Tokyo writing this blog and we have the “hara hachibu” tradition here in Japan of only eating until 80% full. This idea originally came from Okinawa and they are one of the longest lived peoples in the world. I have to break that habit driven deep into my mind by my Mum and not feel compelled to eat everything on the plate. I had lunch the other day with my mate Tak and I noted he left most of his chicken uneaten, which was quite a feat, as the main meal was chicken. Growing up in Japan, maybe he didn’t have to break free of the gravitational pull of “finish everything on your plate”. Roughly once a week, over a meal with my wife, I like to drink Australian wine at home on Fridays after my hard toil at the Dale Carnegie Siberian Salt Mines. I used to finish a bottle between us, but actually I was drinking most of it. Today, I am down to a single glass to give my blood pressure, kidneys and liver a rest. This is extremely hard because I want to keep drinking. It is a weekly battle with myself to stop at one glass. At one point back in the 1990s, when I was working in Nagoya, after many months of wining and dining and being wined and dined, my weight blew up to 90kilos. I didn’t notice it, because it was gradual. After one event where we were having a meal sitting on tatami, some kind soul sent me a photo from the evening. It was taken from the side, so I got a full appraisal of the profile of my massive girth. I was so shocked. Today, my weight floats around 82-83 kilos at the moment and I need to get it floating around 80—81, and those last couple of kilos seem so hard to evaporate. For reference purposes, when I was competing in karate competitions, I was fighting in the 75-80 kilo weight division, so getting close to my fighting weight is a good goal for me to have. Switching off from work is a pain. I think about my problems at work all day and night, and that black monster is always sitting there in the darkened corner of my mind. Lately, I am also adding to my woes by not getting good quality sleep. I am not sure why that is, but I think part of it is not enough exercise. I need to be more tired at night so that I drift off to sleep quickly and smoothly. I was walking every morning, then I caught a cold with the change of the seasons, so I took a break. Then I tripped on the stairs at home, smashed my toe into the stair rise and it is a miracle I didn’t fracture it, but boy has it been sore. Consequently, no walking in the morning. I need to get back to that routine of awakening at 5.50am, get out the door, walk for an hour while listening to podcasts and then get off to work. Getting to the gym regularly is a difficulty because I am often at networking events at night, but I know I can do better. What about going to the gym on the weekends? I can do better. One item you may note that is prominent by its absence is smoking and the quitting thereof. Both my parents died of lung cancer and my father at age 51, so I have ...
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    13 mins
  • 583 AI Enabled Leadership In Japan
    Oct 30 2024
    We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/ Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly. As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help. Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast. 1. Audit We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in terms of time, money, effort and quality. Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results. There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to face that reality head on. It doesn't necessarily mean the person leaves the firm because finding staff in Japan is at a premium, but it may mean their job content changes. There will be flow on effects about required retraining and thought has to be put into the feasibility of doing that with the resources we have available. 2. Strategy & Innovation Having completed the audit we now have some insight into the opportunities and difficulties working with AI will bring, rather than relying on our imaginings of the future. Where is the intersection of AI capabilities and the goals we have set for the firm? The goals are usually revenue related and these won’t change much, but the way we deliver the results could. People will have to work with AI, there is no escaping that fact, so what is the strategy to determine how this happens? We don’t want to leave everyone to their own devices to wander off and somehow work it out by themselves. Which AI platforms do we need, how much should we budget for them and who will take care of what, are leading questions we need to find answers for? For some staff, AI may never be an immediate part of their world at this point, although that may also change. We need to do an analysis of who needs it the most and who needs it first. Which jobs will benefit the most from applying AI’s capabilities to the work? That simple question may be difficult to answer because we have to explore the possibilities AI introduces. We may need to appoint champions to drive the usage of AI inside the company, so that we can break the task up into smaller pieces. The scale of AI can be overwhelming. How can we find ways of having AI help us with becoming more innovative or at least set out some frameworks for us to explore by ourselves? 3. Staff Training A lot of the training for the use of AI will be internal with people dedicating time to play with it. If we think of AI as external to our work, then we won’t nominate the time for people to experiment and learn on the job. The explosion of AI means that no one can keep up with the latest developments as functionalities are superseded by new alternatives. There is also the issue of the broad range of platform variations and upgrades which are emerging every month. How can we navigate this breadth and speed? We can’t but we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed we don’t start. We should select a few platforms which seem to have the greatest application for what we do and start there, realising we may need to jump on to the back of faster racehorse, once the gun has sounded and we are off barrelling down the track. We should block out a certain number of hours per week for our team members to play with AI and see where they can apply its power to the business. If the leader nominates 4 hours a week, for example, then that gives people permission and time from within their work day to experiment. 4. Reporting Naturally, we want to have reports and updates on the progress and learnings these hours experimenting are yielding. This requires some time scheduling changes for everyone and for the boss too. These ideas are all difficult in an already busy life, but we have to grant AI the priority or it will all just be hot air from the boss and there will be no follow through. We are all touching different parts of the machine, so getting together to share makes a lot of sense and the boss can nominate a couple hours in a month to make sure that happens. 5. Data We will unearth and collect a host of data, but what do we do with it? This seeking data for data’s sake is tremendous fun for some, but it all has to connect back to driving the firm forward. There will be financial data we can use to try and pick up trends or patterns which will aid us in trying to set budgets and allocations for spending. ...
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    12 mins
  • 582 Leading People Through Disagreements in Japan
    Oct 23 2024

    Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes."

    These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education.

    Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagreement, especially when you're battling over ideas, policies, direction, or decisions.

    1. Truly Listen to the Other Side

    We often think we are listening, but when we hear the word "no," it looms large in our minds. We become preoccupied with crafting our counterargument and, as a result, stop fully listening to what’s being said. People often make a statement we dislike and then provide their reasoning. If we've already stopped listening after the part we didn’t like, we can’t fully appreciate their logic.

    2. Pause Before Responding

    Before blurting out our disagreement, we need to pause and think. There are a few ways to do this. We can remain silent and think before speaking, although this can be tricky, as silence may prompt the other party to press harder and add more information. Another method is to use a "cushion"—a neutral, non-committal statement that neither agrees nor disagrees. This buys us valuable thinking time. Even a brief pause of five or six seconds can significantly improve the quality of what we say. Without that pause, we risk saying something we regret because we haven't had enough time to formulate a proper response.

    3. Reflect Briefly

    Use this pause to have a brief internal conversation about the topic. Ask yourself: What do I believe? And why do I believe it? Usually, our opinions are formed based on some personal experience, or something we’ve read, heard, or seen. Recalling the origin of our belief helps us structure our response.

    4. Share Your Story

    Once you've reflected, tell your story. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should clearly outline what happened, where, when, and who was involved. This method reminds me of Japanese grammar, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, determining whether the action is positive, negative, past, present, or future. You can’t interrupt someone in Japanese until they finish their sentence because you don’t know where they’re going with it. In English, listeners often anticipate the conclusion and jump in or finish the sentence for the speaker. You can't do that in Japanese.

    By telling your story, you provide background and context. While the listener can disagree with your conclusions, they can’t argue with your background or experience. Given the same context, they might reach the same conclusion. If you tell your story well, they might even reach your conclusion before you do. By holding off on the "punch line" until the very end, you prevent interruptions and ensure they hear you out. Even if they still disagree, they’ll have a clear understanding of why you hold your views.

    By following these four steps, you can persuade others to consider your ideas and ensure you're heard and understood. In the worst-case scenario, even if they still disagree, at least they will fully understand your reasoning. This allows for a civil discussion without heightened emotions, preserving relationships and enabling you to agree to disagree.

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    12 mins

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