Before Shinya Katanozaka became President of ANA Holdings he came up with a genius idea. Allow the passengers to order breakfast, lunch and dinner whenever they pleased. Passenger surveys showed the clients were in full agreement. What the boss had not anticipated was that passengers would order the meals immediately on take-off, making it impossible to deliver on the promise. The plan was soon scrapped.

The point here is not about being willing and unafraid to try new things, in order to differentiate ourselves from the hoi polloi of the competition. That courage and motivation is exemplary. The real issue is that no one inside the ANA organisation told him the “Emperor Has No Clothes”.

When you have dynamic leaders, you often get the “success at all costs no matter what” dynamism, that comes as part of their personality package. They are mentally strong, persuasive, disciplined, hard working, intolerant of weakness, tough, masterful and basically a handful for everyone around them.

As leaders in Japan, one of our biggest fears is ignorance. We may come up with a genius idea that is actually rubbish. The age, stage and power hierarchy here ensures no one wants to stand out by “speaking truth to power”. Subordinates learn quickly that taking personal responsibility for anything is a risky business.

You become a powerful advocate for your own opinion, you are ace at debate, you can wrangle with the best of them to get your way. Hasn’t that been your formula for your massive success so far? Why change what is working?

If the people around us don’t feel the trust to speak up, without being decimated by our forceful personalities, then we will keep on building our ladder higher and higher, better and better up against the wrong wall

Listening to others is a new skill for most bosses, so it will take time to bed it down. The key is to slooooow down. To give our 100% concentration to the person in front of us. To really listen to them for a change.

We have built up a reputation of not listening, of being the bulldozer, of pushing through regardless and of being oblivious to dissenting opinions. This will not get turned around in a day. This is the work of months of effort. This must become the new behaviour change we need to install, if we want to draw on the full power of all the opinions at our disposal. Here is the real crunch point – we have to become more humble about the validity of our own judgment and experience. Got it boss?

Whenever I am in the USA, I love watching the different television preachers in action. I noticed they are master storytellers, usually using Bible incidents to make a point in the here and now. The parables in the Bible are all mini-episodes, which teach a point about success. They are definitely on to something with their storytelling expertise.

As speakers, we have a topic to address, a key message we want communicate and the platform to do so. How can we add memorable, interesting stories to our talk which will bolster the point we are making? The best stories are the ones people can see in their mind’s eye. It is a bit like reading a novel, after you have seen the video series or the movie based on the book. You can easily picture the scenes, the situation, the characters, the backdrops, etc. when you read the text.

This is what we should be looking to create. Short descriptions of incidents that inform a certain course of action. There should be people involved, preferably people they know already. We want locations they can see or imagine. We weave our point into these stories and draw conclusions for the audience on what course they should take.

So, plan the talk well and paint a picture of the season, the location interiors, the people involved. We want the listeners to be able to see all of this in their mind’s eye.

Combining storytelling, with a bit of showmanship, is a powerful move. Being energized will help us get our message through all the competing noise in a busy life. We need to use showmanship in moderation though or it can quickly feel manipulative. It will however lift the energy in the audience and grab their attention, as you download your key points.

Try adding some excellent, illustrative stories into your next presentation and also see where you can add in some showmanship, to engage with the audience members. Let’s use storytelling to become much more memorable as presenters, but in a good way!!!

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed. Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients. Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk. A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level. Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise. Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”. At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains. They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality. There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand.

When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice. When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available. The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.

I ask her for the name of the General Manager. This is where it gets very interesting. Her response - stone motherless silence. Not one word in reply. Nothing! So I asked again. More total silence. I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response. More pure silence. This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.

So what am I thinking now? Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained. There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.

Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service. We all understand that. The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues. Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them. This would have to be a key area of training in that industry. The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership. If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.

The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia. The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels.

From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company. Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise? How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide? Can people get to me easily if there is a problem? Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling? The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job. We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations. We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly. We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients. That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.