The Presentations Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • 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
    Show more Show less
Economics Management
Show more Show less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • 410 Why the First Question Matters - The Role of “Sakura” in Japanese Business Events

    410 Why the First Question Matters - The Role of “Sakura” in Japanese Business Events
    Nov 4 2024
    In Australian politics, they call it a “Dorothy Dixer”. This is when one of your confederates from your own political party ask a ruling Minister a real soft ball question in the parliament during Question Time, to allow for a fully pre-prepared answer. Dorothy Dix was an American newspaper advice columnist who would answer reader’s questions, and some say she sometimes would create her own questions to answer. At political rallies, there has been a similar set up where a stooge or a plant in the audience asks the speaker a pre-arranged question, but tries to make it look spontaneous. At business events, the speaker may have organised a friend to pop a question they want to answer to reduce time for questions they don’t want to answer or to make themselves look awesome. In Japan, these people asking the questions are called “Sakura” and they play the same role. I know this goes on because from time to time I am asked to be a Sakura at a business presentation. I am infamous around town for asking the first question. This happened by accident and now if I don’t ask the first question, people will ask what is wrong with me? Many years ago, I did have a question I wanted answered and before I could register my enquiry, the MC said “no more questions” and I was left suspended high and dry. I realised I could never predict when the last question would make it to prominence, but I could 100% reliably predict when the first question would come up. I also realised that in Japan, at least, there is always a pause when the MC throws the floor open to questions, as many people are reluctant to ask their question immediately. This provides the opportunity to be the first with no competition and the MC is forced to take your question. Sometimes the organisers or the speaker will approach me before things kick-off and ask if I can get things going by asking the first question. They fear that flat, spine decalcifying, stone motherless silence when they call for questions. It seems a damming verdict on the speaker that they were a dull dog, so dull in fact that no one wants to hear one more word from them on this subject. I can only recall one case where I was actually asked to lodge a specific question, so normally they leave that part of the equation to me. I ask questions anyway and unless the question itself is stupid, too self-serving or cringy, and I already know the person asking, I am usually happy to help. The speaker may have a desire to address an area of the subject which they couldn’t get to in the talk and may ask for a question which allows them to talk more about that topic. That would be a reasonable request, because not everyone in the audience may be an expert and be able to fill in the blanks across a broad subject. Should you as the speaker organise a “Sakura” for your talk? I don’t think this is prohibited, but there are a few caveats. You, as the speaker, must be prepared to answer audience questions and the “Sakura” role is not there to provide cover for you from legitimate questions, by stealing the question airtime. The question shouldn’t be a soft ball job either. It should be a question that seeks more information in a serious way. Asking cunning variations on, “why are you so awesome” or “why are you the leading global expert on this subject?”, would be ridiculous choices and the jig is up immediately and everyone involved in the charade looks stupid. In Japan, it is often the case that audiences are shy to ask the first question, but feel emboldened when some other brave “first mover” grips the thistle in their teeth and launches forth. Asking questions in the West has no stigma and indicates an interest in learning more from the speaker. These are all seen as positive attributes. In Japan, asking a question has five inferences: 1. The speaker was stupid and their talk impenetrable, 2. They were a poor communicator and the audience couldn’t follow the point, 3. You the questioner are too stupid to understand what the speaker said, 4. You want hog the limelight for yourself, stand out and try to impress everyone with how smart you think you are, by asking that question, 5. You have a legitimate question and the speaker was so amazing you want to learn more because you are a serious student of this topic. Most of the weight in Japan is on the negative side about asking questions. Therefore, sometimes we may need to get the ball moving with a question to the speaker to give permission to others to ask their secretly held question. Another suitable device is that if there is that deafening silence after questions are called for, to pose and then answer your own question. “A question I am often asked is…”. It has the same effect, gets things moving inviting the next question and you become your own “Sakura”.
    Show more Show less
    11 mins
  • 409 Use Your Visuals Checklist When Presenting In Japan

    409 Use Your Visuals Checklist When Presenting In Japan
    Oct 28 2024
    There are 6 elements we should check when putting our visuals together. Review this checklist before you start building the slide deck and your presentation will be much more impactful and successful. 1. Make sure you are boss of the visuals and not the other way around Often, the speaker is overshadowed by the visuals and everyone’s attention is directed toward the screen. We must remember that the screen has limited persuasion power compared to using our facial expressions. We can express disbelief, shock, bemusement, horror, joy, doubt, concentration, scepticism, engagement, hostility, agreement, happiness, etc. No screen can do that and we should be combining our words with our facial expression to really drive home the point we want to make. We must make the visuals our servant and not allow them to become our master. You see a lot of presenters who are almost invisible, because they have yielded control to what is up on the screen. We should stand stage left to the screen because we read from left to right. We want the audience to be captured by our voice and facial expression and then they look at what is on the screen, rather than just looking at the screen and ignoring us. If you find that the audience are not looking at you, just stop speaking. That pattern interrupt will draw them all back to your face to find out what is going on. We should also be using our eyes to look directly at members of the audience for six seconds and speak to them One-On-One. That technique has a powerful magnetic grip on our listeners. However, be careful, we can only hold that pressure for six seconds per person or it becomes too intrusive. 2. Tiny fonts are not useful We have all seen it. The presenter puts up a slide and the font sizes are tiny. Just to rub insult into the wound, they sometimes say dumb things like “I know you cannot read this but….”. But what? Why on earth do we have to sit there and look at a screen that we cannot read? The Golden Rule with any slide is that if the viewer cannot get the main point within two seconds, then the slide is too complicated. This is especially the case with fonts. Make sure the fonts are big enough to read easily and if there is a fear of not being able to get them to the right size, then that slide probably needs to be broken into two or more slides. This is usually the solution for most slide shows. Get the information on to more slides and then we can easily enlarge the detail on the slide to make it easier to read. One way to check the sizes are correct during the production process is to print out the slide and place it on the floor in front of you when standing. If you cannot read the detail, then more work is needed to adjust the size so that you can read it at a distance. 3. Graphs, graphs and more graphs Seeing six graphs on a screen is not uncommon in many presentations. The obvious problem with this idea is that the fonts and numbers are so small, it is impossible to read what is on the graph. In general, the Chart Golden Rule is one graph per slide. That allows us to make the graphs large enough to be easy to parse. Bar charts are a great tool for comparisons. We can contrast results spread over one or two years. More than that and the bar charts become hard to read. If we need to see a comparison over longer periods of time then line charts are the best for that. Again, we should probably cap things at three variable because once we get over that number it looks like spaghetti and you have trouble following what is going on. Pie charts are good for comparing shares of something. Two pie charts are the limit in this regard, because after that it gets hard to see what is on the screen. 4. White space is good A lot of presentations are trying to cram all the information on to one slide. The various contents are now competing for our attention. Leaving a lot of white space on the screen is an excellent way of highlighting key information and forcing the audience to concentrate on the one thing we want to emphasise. Putting up one number in large font or one word is very powerful. There is only one thing to look at and we can talk to that number and elaborate on why that number or word is significant. 5. Use one photo and attach some mystery “A picture is worth a thousand words” is a great saying and very true. It really allows us to make our point. We could carry this to the extreme and put up lots of photos, but we are defeating our aim of getting our message across. We are splitting our audience’s attention too thinly. If we can include people in the photo, then that is even more attractive as we love to see people’s faces compared to cityscapes or landscapes. We are drawn to look at people’s faces. Knowing that, we can find a photo which has that element and which will assist us to make our key ...
    Show more Show less
    13 mins
  • 408 Tech Talkers Need Help In Japan

    408 Tech Talkers Need Help In Japan
    Oct 21 2024

    It's been a while since I attended a highly technical talk by serious experts. The audience, however, was not as expert, so the two speakers knew they were addressing a less specialized group. Complex topics require special handling.Piling a lot of data onto one slide is a big no-no, but that didn’t stop our intrepid, geeky speakers. One of them, a retired professor, you’d think would be better at this given he taught it at a university. Perhaps I’m too optimistic about academics and technical specialists having actual teaching abilities compared to their true passion—research.

    Most of the slides were terrible.There was one slide, in particular, that showed a key timeline and included important projections into the future. It looked amazing.Yet, I still wonder what it said. The font was so tiny, and there were so many colours. Audience members like me had no ability to decipher the actual content. This slide was crucial, given the future implications of the technology they were discussing.

    So folks, the simple lesson here is to carefully consider how you present information on-screen. If it’s too complex, provide handouts so attendees can at least grasp what is going on. If you are going to show difficult content on-screen, make the fonts large, and keep the slides simple and easy to understand. Also, please scale back on the wild color palettes.

    As I sat there, I thought that horizontal timeline could have been magnified on the next slide to highlight key turning points in the continuum. It could have been like a blow-up of a part of the timeline, with the rest of the sequence becoming background wallpaper. The key components would be magnified on-screen for easy digestion, or they could have just broken up the timeline into larger sections on separate slides. None of this is complex.These were seriously well-educated, intelligent people giving this presentation. So, there's no doubt this is not beyond them. But if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

    The subject is absolutely topical and exciting, yet the talk was very dry. Like many technical people, they got lost in the tech aspects.This might be fine for a presentation to scientists or specialists, but we, the audience, were not as familiar with the finer points. In this case, a different approach should have been taken.

    The visuals need to be more simplified. Key points should be kept clear and accessible. Analogies are a wonderful tool for taking complex, difficult subjects and making them clearer. For example, strategic plans are like gelato. Initially, this seems puzzling—what’s the connection between ice cream and business planning? But just like with gelato, we have many flavors and options. We don’t know which is best until we taste them. Similarly, a strategic plan might seem comprehensive, but we won’t know if it works until we execute it.

    The speakers also missed the opportunity to use storytelling.

    We were stuck at a theoretical and technical level, with no stories to elevate the key points.This area of science is full of stories—about the scientists, breakthroughs, triumphs, and setbacks. But we didn’t hear any of that. There was no “flesh on the bones” of the science.Think about how complex technical subjects are presented in movies or TV dramas. Progress is always depicted through a rich tapestry of stories.That talk was just yesterday, but right now, I can’t recall the name of even one key person who contributed to the rise of the technology, nor do I have any stories to tie the information together. This is key: stories are like glue.They help us connect complex topics over time by creating a narrative about who was involved, what they did, where and when it happened, and the outcomes.

    Drama grabs our interest and holds our attention.Without stories, it was hard for the speakers to connect with their non-technical audience. Even harder to make the key messages memorable. Hammering the audience with facts and details doesn’t ensure the message gets through. I can’t recall any of the statistics they shared. Had they wrapped those numbers in a story, I might remember. So, technical presenters, be sure to craft stories we can all recall later.

    Make sure that what’s presented visually is simplified so we can easily absorb the key points. Analogies are a great tool for explaining complex subjects and should be in every technical speaker’s toolbox. Having an amazing brain and decades of research experience won’t help if you can’t engage your audience and convey your message effectively.
    Show more Show less
    12 mins

What listeners say about The Presentations Japan Series

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available