The Presentations Japan Series Podcast By Dr. Greg Story cover art

The Presentations Japan Series

The Presentations Japan Series

By: 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 Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Presenting During The Time Of Cancel Culture

    Presenting During The Time Of Cancel Culture
    Jun 2 2025
    “That has to come out”. “Why?”. “It might offend women in the audience”. “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”. And so it went on. This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture. Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America. Until now. The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America. Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that specific change to my speech. It got me wondering about our ability as presenters to present our thoughts in public. What does this mean for the future of public speaking? Living in Japan, I had vaguely heard of cancel culture. I understood it to be mainly centred on Universities where students were confronting their Professor’s ideas and comments they disagreed with. I had read in the media about youthful tweets and social media postings coming back to haunt the authors many years later. I cannot say I ever expected to be cancelled. The offending item was an image objectifying women in Japan. A photo of a maid café young lady done up in a frilly miniskirt in fact. At her request, I took my anime besotted teenage daughter to visit a maid café in Akihabara when she was visiting from Australia a number of years ago. The image in the photo corresponded with the outfits I saw being worn by the staff, so the image in question was congruent with the maid café experience. That is to say it reflected a reality, a truth, we can see any day of the week in Akihabara. Apparently, such a confronting picture would be too much for women located outside Japan and in particular those living in the USA. The speech topic was on Diversity and Inclusion in Japan. The main issue here is gender inequality, although sexual orientation has become more prominent lately. The context of this speech was that the comment by ex- Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori about women on boards talking too much, can be traced back to the Confucian idea of a woman’s place in society being there to serve men, throughout all stages of their lives. The maid café photograph was an example of how these women are being objectified to serve male fantasies in the modern era and therefore, there is still a long way to go for women in business to achieve gender equity here in Japan. The photograph was totally in context with the text and was not supporting the objectification of women, in fact the precise opposite. So, being told it had to be removed was incomprehensible to me. I argued about the photograph being in the context of the text and that the central argument I was making made it all congruent. This next pushback was the snapper for me: “Women seeing the photo alone would be offended. There was the danger they would not pick up on what you were saying in the video and may misinterpret your meaning”. “Wait a moment. You are saying they are not smart enough, intelligent enough to discern the context of what I am saying and therefore the photograph and that paragraph have to be cut?”. That struck me as being totally chauvinistic and condescending to women. By now you will have worked out I was having this conversation with another man. He reported back to me that he had discussed it with some female leaders in that organisation and the consensus was that I couldn’t include it. Here is the dilemma we have to face – do we agree with this cancel culture putsch or do we stand our ground. I felt this was a matter of free speech, free expression and I really struggled with whether I should buckle under this request for removal pressure or should I fight. If I remove it, unintelligent people win. If I refuse to go ahead and recuse myself on the basis of the principle of free speech, unintelligent people win. If I fight, then I create powerful enemies and get bogged down in the cancel culture wars. Where is the line regarding what is acceptable and what is not? Who is the arbiter of the line location? How do we deal with committees making these decisions? Are they representative of the masses or are they wannabe oligarchs calling the shots? I removed it. But I have felt very uneasy about that decision ever since. I have so many thoughts flying around in my brain about this cancel culture issue and I cannot get them to fly in formation as yet. This was an eye opener for me. I often make the point that we speakers and presenters live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism. It would appear we are also living in the Epoch of Cancel Culture. What do we do? Pick our fights? Assemble the barricades on principle on every occasion? Fight or fold? I folded, but I regretted it. What about you? When the cancel culture brown shirts turn up, what is your plan? “What is that you say, no plan”. ...
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    12 mins
  • Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting

    Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting
    May 26 2025
    Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations. The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers. Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded. The slant taken was how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot high greasy pole. As with other luncheon speaker events, you had a chance to meet people beforehand and then engage with your table mates over the meal. I reflected that I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients. I noted that none of them worked for a mega beast even close to the size of this colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice didn’t quite hit the mark. How could that be, I thought to myself? Who Is In The Room? One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room. At what level should you pitch your content? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes? These days it may be hard to get the full list of who is coming, because of privacy concerns, but usually you can at least get the company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, then hopefully the speech may have taken a different direction and would have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend. Our Purpose Is? We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk. Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade? Responding to the organisers request for a talk on a certain topic doesn’t determine the purpose. We are given the overall theme and analysing our audience, we know now what angle we should select. In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right. The relevancy bit was completely missing though, but at least the purpose was correct. An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech. Think back to the presentations you have attended. Could you recognise the event speaker’s approach or was it just a jumble, a catch all effort? I am putting my money on “jumble”. First Three Seconds We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet. Why three seconds? Over the last five years I have been asking participants in our presentation classes, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new. The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes. When I ask that same question today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds. It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned and well executed or we will have lost the room. The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism. Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments? They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. They are doing other amateur things like pounding the microphone asking “can you hear me down the back?” At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting. Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone? How To Begin Rules number one and two of presenting are rehearse before you give the talk and never practice on your audience. Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters. This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived. Get there early and check all the equipment. No microphone thumping please! Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go. We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result. Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue. Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room. Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation. Why six seconds? Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one. However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive. We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our ...
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    14 mins
  • Ineffective Persuasion Techniques For Presenters

    Ineffective Persuasion Techniques For Presenters
    May 19 2025
    This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”. Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who don’t spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face. It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought. When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility. You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy. That lightweight scene setting wasn’t given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen. Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message. No one thought about that either. They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done. The camera saps twenty percent of our energy. If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous. You need to ramp up the speaking power. If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent. The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point. Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses. We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said. Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost. The camera is also unforgiving. If you can’t hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff. You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time. You don’t want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though. A massive close up of your dial isn’t going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit. It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen. Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no. If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world’s leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter. You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time. This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a “once over lightly” approach to a serious subject. I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube. She was the complete package. She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter. However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text. You don’t want that. You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time. That takes some time to get right. You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk. There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us. The visuals were not clever. Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman. Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider. He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably. Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message. Once it is done, it is out there. His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video. His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme. I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right. It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can’t get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things? There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications. In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering. For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over four hundred pieces on the subject, for free, over the last years. Don’t allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of ...
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    13 mins
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