The Leadership Japan Series copertina

The Leadership Japan Series

The Leadership Japan Series

Di: Dale Carnegie Japan
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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.© 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved. Economia Gestione e leadership Management
Episodi
  • As A Leader, Welcome Common Enemies

    As A Leader, Welcome Common Enemies
    Oct 14 2026
    I have talked before about the loneliness of the leader. You feel it most strongly when things are going badly. The entrepreneur, in particular, owns the company and carries the ultimate responsibility. I am reminded of ship captains in the age of sail. They were responsible for getting their passengers and cargo safely to the destination while dealing with terrible weather and even worse pirates. The modern company captain faces different dangers, but the responsibility is just as real. People's livelihoods depend on the decisions we make. Get things badly wrong and we can bankrupt the company or become vulnerable to a takeover that destroys what we have built. When a powerful competitor appears, though, there is another way to look at the situation. That rival may actually become one of the leader's most useful tools. Why can a strong competitor actually help a leader? A powerful external competitor can give the team a common enemy, creating greater unity, urgency and commitment around winning in the marketplace. Instead of allowing the rival to generate fear, the leader can use the competitive threat as a rallying cry. This becomes particularly important when industries are disrupted. The Covid years damaged long-established companies across sectors affected by lockdowns, government restrictions, declining customer demand and supply-chain problems. M&A activity followed and, in many cases, the strong devoured the weak. Perhaps your company survived. Great. But now you may be facing larger, better-funded competitors with greater resources. That can be terrifying. Or it can provide the team with a clear external challenge around which everyone can unite. The leader's job is to convert anxiety into purposeful action. Do now: When a powerful competitor appears, don't communicate only the danger. Frame the challenge around what the team can collectively do to win. Why are internal enemies so destructive to organisations? Competition should be directed outside the company rather than between divisions, departments or ambitious individuals inside it. Internal rivalry consumes energy that should be directed toward winning customers and beating genuine competitors. I have experienced this myself. In big organisations, ambitious people sometimes eye your patch and decide they should be running it instead of you. Before you know it, the elbows come out. Political alliances form. People start protecting territory. Information gets withheld. The other division gradually becomes "the enemy". This is madness. The customer doesn't care about your internal politics. Neither does your external competitor. While everyone inside the organisation is busy fighting over the main deck, the real pirates may be pulling alongside the ship. Well-run companies squash destructive internal rivalry before it develops momentum. Do now: Make it absolutely clear that the competitor is outside the organisation. Internal functions may disagree, but they should ultimately be fighting on the same side. How should smaller companies respond to powerful competitors? Smaller companies should resist trying to match larger rivals dollar-for-dollar or entering destructive price wars; they need to compete through differentiated value. When a powerful competitor starts flooding the market with advertising, smaller companies can feel helpless. Usually, we don't have unlimited financial reserves. Trying to match their advertising spend may simply burn through the cash we need elsewhere. Price wars are equally dangerous. They are a race to the bottom, and the bigger rival may have enough financial muscle to absorb the pain much longer than we can. So don't fight exclusively on their terms. Instead, ask how you can strengthen the value offering. Perhaps the product line-up needs changing. Maybe the packaging of the offer needs adjusting. Perhaps customers need a clearer reason to choose you rather than the larger competitor. Differentiation becomes the battlefield. Do now: Instead of asking how you can match a larger competitor's spending or pricing, identify where your value proposition can become meaningfully different and stronger. How can leaders persuade teams to accept competitive change? Leaders can use the external competitive threat to explain why change is necessary, but they must create urgency without generating panic. This is a delicate balancing act. As with many things in Japan, adjusting to change isn't necessarily the strongest suit of every team. People may prefer the familiar processes, products and methods that have worked until now. But tough times demand tough changes. The external competitor can help the leader make the case. "We aren't changing this because management suddenly became bored with the existing system. We are changing because the market has changed, our competitors have changed and we need to become stronger." People generally don't enjoy the idea of being beaten by a rival. Use that competitive pride. The ...
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    15 min
  • Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part Two)

    Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part Two)
    Oct 7 2026
    In Part One, we looked at Dr Emily Anhalt's research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists. She identified seven factors that help measure how emotionally "fit" we are. We covered the first three: learning our emotional triggers and biases, understanding the emotions of others and finding comfort in discomfort. Now we come to the remaining four. These move us from understanding ourselves toward something even more challenging: building meaningful connections, recovering from setbacks, asking others for help and actually implementing what we learn. That last point may be the toughest of them all. Why do leaders need a psychologically safe space outside work? Leaders need relationships and environments where they can relax, lower their guard and simply be themselves.Constantly operating as "the boss" without somewhere psychologically safe to decompress can leave leaders increasingly isolated. "Psychological safety" has become a familiar term in business, but leaders need it too. Ideally, that safe space may come from family and close friends. Here is the rub: leaders are often so busy working that they don't invest enough time in developing those relationships. I put my hand up for this one. I am in permanent imbalance trying to get the balance right. Work projects continually compete with family, friendships, hobbies and interests. For those of us working in Japan, there can be an additional complication because we may be thousands of kilometres away from the friends and colleagues we grew up with. Isolation isn't a good long-term leadership strategy. Do now: Deliberately invest time in family, friendships, hobbies and interests where you can stop being "the boss" and simply be yourself. How can leaders bounce forward after failure and setbacks? Emotionally fit leaders don't erase failure; they acknowledge what happened, extract what they can learn and refuse to let the past control their future. The objective isn't merely to bounce back but to bounce forward. Being positive sounds easy. We tell ourselves that failures aren't really failures. They are opportunities to grow and learn. Except we often don't behave that way. Instead, we beat ourselves up and keep replaying the video of the disaster in our minds. We remember what we said, what we should have done and how badly things turned out. That mental replay starts interfering with the work sitting in front of us. Our confidence shrinks. We take fewer risks. Our world of possibilities becomes smaller. The memory may remain, but we don't have to continually feed it with worry. That was then. This is now. Do now: When an old failure returns to your mind, acknowledge it, capture the lesson and consciously return your attention to what you can influence today. How can leaders stop worrying about mistakes from the past? Being unhappy about something that happened is different from repeatedly worrying about it. We may not control when an unpleasant memory appears, but we can work on whether we allow it to dominate our thinking. This distinction is important. We cannot magically remove painful memories. They have an irritating habit of popping up whether invited or not. The question is what happens next. Instead of climbing aboard the mental train and travelling all the way back into the disaster, note what happened and move on. "Yes, that happened." "Yes, I wish I had handled it differently." "Yes, I learned something." And then stop. The circumstances have changed. You have changed. The world has moved on. Leadership requires enough emotional capacity to deal with today's problems without continually dragging yesterday's problems along behind us. Do now: Note the memory without feeding the worry. Extract the lesson, recognise that circumstances have changed and return your attention to the present. Why should leaders express their needs and ask for support? Modern leadership is too complex for the old heroic model in which the boss is expected to know everything, need nothing and solve every problem alone. Emotionally fit leaders recognise when they need support and are willing to ask for it. I grew up in macho Australia. The strong, silent type was the model. If you had needs, you sorted them out yourself. Feelings were kept safely out of sight. Asking for help? Forget it. The assumption was that rivals would despise you, bosses wouldn't trust you and your team wouldn't follow you if they detected vulnerability. Business today is different. Technology, speed and complexity have made the heroic boss a relic from another era. There is simply too much going on for one person to possess all the answers. I tell my son not to be like Dad. Ask people for support and help. Don't imagine you have to do everything yourself like I did. Do now: Identify one area where you are unnecessarily carrying the load alone and ask someone you trust for help, advice or support. Should leaders show vulnerability and share their feelings? Leaders can acknowledge that they...
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    14 min
  • Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part One)

    Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part One)
    Sep 30 2026
    Dr Emily Anhalt is an American psychologist who developed the concept of a gym for mental health after researching 100 leaders and 100 psychologists who treated leaders. From that work, she identified seven factors for assessing how emotionally "fit" we are. That concept should get every leader's attention. Does anyone seriously believe leadership is going to become easier, slower and less stressful? I certainly don't. Many of us grew up in the "harden up" era. Soldier on. Suck it up. Grit your teeth and bear it. That approach may have got us through previous decades, but today's leaders operate amid vastly greater technological change, business speed, global connectivity and organisational complexity. We spend considerable time thinking about physical fitness. Perhaps we need to start taking our emotional fitness just as seriously. In Part One, let's look at three areas: understanding our emotional triggers and biases, recognising the emotions of others, and finding comfort in discomfort. Why do leaders need emotional fitness? Leaders need emotional fitness because greater business complexity and pressure place constant demands on how they respond to stress, conflict and other people. Leadership isn't becoming less stressful, so relying purely on toughness and endurance is unlikely to be enough. Previous generations often celebrated the leader who simply pushed through every difficulty. There is certainly value in resilience, but emotional fitness requires more than enduring pressure. Leaders influence everyone around them. When the boss becomes angry, defensive or frustrated, the impact spreads through the team. When the leader remains composed, listens and responds thoughtfully, that behaviour also influences everyone. The objective isn't to eliminate emotion. That would be impossible and probably undesirable. The objective is to become more conscious of our emotional responses and more skilful in determining what happens next. Like physical fitness, this requires practice. Do now: Start treating your emotional responses as a leadership capability that can be deliberately strengthened rather than simply accepting, "That's just the way I am." How can leaders identify and manage their emotional triggers? Leaders need to recognise the "Hot Buttons" that trigger emotional reactions and learn to create a small gap between the trigger and their response. That gap can be enough to prevent an impulsive reaction becoming an unnecessary conflict. This is familiar territory for me because I teach a course called Disagree Agreeably. We examine the triggers that get the temper rising, blood pressure pulsing and body heat climbing rapidly. My wife assures me my temper is getting shorter as I get older. She is probably correct. There never seems to be any shortage of things capable of irritating us. The important point is that we may not be able to prevent the irritation. What we can work on is our response. Rather than allowing the emotional trigger to immediately produce an emotional reaction, insert what I call a cushion. That gives the brain a chance to catch up with the mouth. Do now: Identify your recurring Hot Buttons. Knowing what regularly sets you off gives you a better chance of controlling what happens when someone presses one. How can leaders stop themselves reacting emotionally in difficult conversations? A short, neutral "cushion" statement can act as a circuit breaker between an irritating comment and the leader's response. The purpose isn't to agree with the other person; it is to buy enough time to choose a considered response. Suppose somebody says something that immediately gets your blood boiling. Our natural tendency may be to fire straight back. Instead, try saying something like: "Thank you for raising this topic. It is an important one." That takes me about four or five seconds to say. Those few seconds can be enormously valuable. They give me time to overrule the impulse to launch forth with the first thing that pops into my head and instead find a more considered response to whatever nonsense my interlocutor has been sprouting. The cushion neither diminishes the issue nor inflames it. It simply creates space. Do now: Prepare one or two neutral cushion statements in advance so you don't have to invent them when somebody has already pushed your Hot Button. Why should leaders try harder to understand the emotions of others? Leaders should remember that people's behaviour may be influenced by pressures and problems we know absolutely nothing about. A little more empathy can help us respond with greater patience rather than immediately judging someone against our expectations. There is a saying I have always liked: "Remember everyone in life is carrying a heavy load." I was reminded of this while recovering in hospital from a near-death experience with pneumonia after spending six days in the Intensive Care Unit. It gave me plenty of time to reflect. One conclusion was that I ...
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    12 min
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