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.

We love acronyms! Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes. They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to have evidence around pontification.

“Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice. Reliable is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority. “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty. Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished.

“Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills. Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don’t know what that viewpoint is. Busy bosses don’t have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace. Some don’t care – just get me the numbers – or else! Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost. Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people.

“Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture. Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon. It means communicating beyond this quarter’s goals and placing each individual’s role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal. The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually.

“Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience. Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key. Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business. If we aren’t prepared to permanently kill our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors.

REAL, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power. We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them. Let’s change that.

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets. In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in the client’s best interests. We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer’s needs. We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that triggers a “we hadn’t thought of that” reaction at best and at worst, at least know if we have a solution for them or not. Under pressure though, salespeople can go temporarily deaf.

Even assuming they are smart enough to ask questions in the first place, they may fall over when it comes to listening to the buyer’s answers. They are not actually plumbing the depths of what the client is trying to achieve. In fact, they are ignoring the hints and nuances in the sales conversation. What are they doing? They are fixated on their needs, their target achievement, their big bonus, their job security.

The client may have outlined what they had in mind, but that won’t scratch because the salesperson needs a bigger sale to make target. They need to expand what the client wants regardless of whether the client needs that solution or not. Upselling and cross selling are legitimate aspects of sales, but the purpose has to be very clear. It is not about making the salesperson more money

The client may not have the full view of what is possible, because they will never know the seller’s lineup of solutions as well as the salesperson. They will also not have had deep conversations with their competitors. They won’t have been allowed behind the velvet curtain, to see what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it. They will not have had a broad exposure to what other firms and industries are doing in terms of best practice.

This is the value of the salesperson, because they are constantly doing all of these things. They are collectors of stories, problems, breakthroughs, successes and can connect many dots together. In this sense, they can see possibilities the client may not have know exist or may not have thought of. This is where the cross-sell and the up-sell add value, because the salesperson can expand the client’s world and help them to become more successful. That is a long way from ramping up the number value of the sale, to make target.

Nevertheless, this is what happens when the focus is on the wrong objective. If salespeople are trying to expand the complexity of the sale, to manufacture a larger sale, at some point the client is going to drop out. Unless they see overwhelming value in increasing the scope, they are well aware that this enlarged project is over budget.

Now budget is just a fiction and we all know that. It is an imaginary estimate of where expenses could be allocated and it occupies a cell in a spreadsheet line. Many times we have seen budgets miraculously appear from nowhere, when the perceived value is great. The “Rob Peter To Pay Paul” school of accounting.

The point about value comes back to listening skills. If the salesperson is focused on the client’s benefit, then they can rummage through their memory banks for best practices that could be applied to help the client achieve their aim. In the process, this may mean increasing the investment to get a bigger return.

If the salesperson is just focused on getting their monthly number, they are not really paying attention to the client’s needs at all. They just start padding the details of the project, so that the numbers are bumped up. Once the client feels they are being ramped up for the salesperson’s benefit, then the trust is gone and the deal won’t happen anyway.

Salespeople need to be really listening to the needs of the client and should forget about what they want. As Zig Ziglar said, “if you can help enough other people get what they want, then you will get what you want”. Zig was a great listener!

Basically your job is toast. There is a machine or there will soon be a machine that can do it faster, better and cheaper than you. Our skill set didn’t change much from the start of agriculture 12,000 years ago until the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century. This last 150 years has been busy. We have created a weapon that can destroy our race. Who thought we would be that stupid? Fifty years ago we didn’t believe machine translation of our complex language skills would get very far.

Driving cars and trucks requires us, because it is such a delicate, detailed and difficult set of tasks. What a ridiculous idea to imagine replacing those cantankerous, aging Japanese taxi drivers and punch perm truckers here in Tokyo with a self-driving, self-navigating vehicles. Internet of Things Komatsu tractors ploughing rice fields by themselves, nah, never happen. Apocalypse Now style “death from the air” requires top gun pilots and gum chewing gunners, doesn’t it. Killing each other can’t be delegated to drones. Robot vacuum cleaners, programmable pets, hotty droid receptionists, nimble stair climbing machines, adult men (many with passports) waving light sticks at holograph vocalists (Hatsune Miku) – not possible right?

Don’t worry, moral and ethical judgments, “the buck stops here” business decisions, hiring and firing employment protocols, creative brainstorming – there is a long list of actions which will always require people to be involved.

We need the human interaction, to hear stories, to share experiences, to be motivated, to aspire together against the rival firm, to set and follow our organisation’s Vision and Mission. We want empathy, collaboration, a sense of ownership, relationships.

Geoff Colvin in his book “Humans Are Underrated” references a recent Oxford Economics study asking employers which staff skills they will need the most over the next five to ten years. The top priorities were all right brain - relationship building, teaming, co-creativity, brainstorming, cultural sensitivity and the ability to manage diverse employees.

Henry Ford complained that every time he wanted a pair of human hands on his assembly line, he got “a brain attached”. Today, we want that brain that can feel as well as think. We have to be good at being human and good in our interactions with other humans. Colvin noted, “being a great performer is becoming less about what you know and more about what you’re like.

Here is the challenge for typical male CEO driver types, who are assertive and task, not people, oriented: how to lead organisations where technical skill is being outsourced to bots and the value of human interaction has become more critical to the success of the organisation?. Do you ignore it or do you decide to change? How do you change?

My eyes are closing. I am struggling to stay awake. There is something about this presentation that is not working. I thought, it must be me. I must be tired. Later however I realized the problem. I was being lulled into sleep by the monotone delivery of the presenter.

The brand by the way is gorgeous. This is seriously high profile, a name that everyone knows and respects. The name alone triggers images that are all first class. The slides and videos he presented were all quality. These people have money and they know about marketing very high end products.

Our speaker had all of this powerful support going for him, yet the actual presentation was sleep inducing. Why was that? The brand is a passion brand, but there was no passion. The brand is a great story, but the storytelling was minimal. The delivery was wooden. Measured, but wooden.

Fortunately, despite his lifeless delivery, the brand is so powerful it can survive his attempt to murder it. But what a wasted opportunity. It is not as if this brand doesn’t have competitors. He is their guy in Japan, so that is his job, every time, everywhere.

It was a good audience too. These are people who appreciate a good brand, who are influencers, who can spread the message. No one will bother though because they were not receiving any energy from this talk.

Brands are being recreated every single day. When the product is consumed that is a brand defining moment. If the brand promise is not delivered when the product or service is consumed, then the brand is that much lessened. If this continues, then the brand will disappear, vanquished by its competitors.

If our man in Japan had given a high energy presentation, extolling the virtues of the brand, that would have been consistent with the positioning of the brand. If you are representing a funeral home however, that would not be appropriate. So obviously we need to be congruent. This brand case though would be a great platform for enthusiastic storytelling and verbal passion for the brand. Where were the gripping stories of high drama and intrigue, as they duked it out with their competitors across the globe and over the decades? Where were the human dimension stories of the customers who were famous and fans.

There was little or nor energy being transmitted to the audience. When we speak we have to radiate that energy to the listeners. We need to invigorate them. We do this through our voice and our body language. It is an inside out process, where the internal belief is so powerful it explodes out to the audience. They see we are convinced, we are believers and they become believers too.

Let’s raise our energy levels up when promoting our company in a public presentation. Make sure our voice is using all the range of highs and lows to get full tonal variety. No monotone delivery please. We need to punch out hard certain key words and phrases, like the crescendos in classical music. We need our body language to be backing this up, our gestures in sync with what we are saying. We need to lift the energy of the audience through our personal power.

Pricing is usually set by the boss and salespeople are just there to get out and sell at that designation. The trouble though is salespeople are not convinced by any price setting methodology. They only believe in the reality of the market. The way they know the reality is the degree of pushback they get from clients, when they are trying to sell.

When you have no belief in the value backing up that price point, your ability to sell at that rate is simply squashed. You default to discounting to get a small piece of something, rather than a very large piece of nothing.

The crunch point is the sales price negotiation with the buyer. If you have gotten into the death spiral of last minute discounting, in order to move the product or service, you have now trained the buyer to extract the biggest possible discount every time.

Instead, give them an ultimatum on price and a very, very short fixed time to take it or leave it. In the meantime, call another potential buyer. If you have not built up pipeline for your sales, then you are always going to be vulnerable to price collapse.

If you discount once and then imagine that by telling the Japanese buyer this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, a spectacularly rare alignment of the planets, which will never happen again in their lifetime, a never to be repeated offer, you are kidding yourself.

Don’t miss this. In Japan, as soon as you drop the price, you are now locked into that price point with that client forever. It is not impossible to go higher but it is very, very hard to pull that one off. You have to be ready to drop the buyer entirely, to restore your price point validation.

The equation here isn’t just with the buyer, it is with the salespeople as well. By dropping the price we tell them that this is all this is worth and they believe it. They cannot push the price back up, because they don’t see it at that level either. The company leadership has to intervene and say “burn that buyer if they won’t accept this price”. Be prepared to lose their business. If we do that, then the salespeople will get religion about the pricing validity.

When we are haggling over the price with the buyer and they say that, “this price is too high”, “that is out of our budget”, “we can’t afford it at that level, ”can’t you drop the price”, “we never pay that much”, etc., we are in a bind. We want the sale, so we immediately go into discount mode. This is a big negotiating mistake.

Don’t fold on the price pushback. What we should be doing is defending our price. We don’t do that by arguing with the buyer. We don’t do that by force of will. We do it by trying to better understand the client’s situation. Often salespeople stop asking questions at this critical juncture and instead go into high energy “tell mode”. They start telling all the good reasons why the buyer should pay the requested price. This won’t work.

Firstly, don’t start your response by arguing with the client. Instead agree with them. We can say, “You are right and I understand it is a considerable investment”. If we disagree with them, they stop listening to us and start thinking about all the reasons their “too high” statement was correct.

While we have their attention, we have to transition and question the buyer as to why they made that comment. “You just mentioned the price was too high, may I ask you why you feel that way?”. We avoid arguing and instead of us having to justify the price, we now need to switch it. After you make that comment do not speak.

In this process of further explanation by the buyer, we pick up very valuable insights into the client’s situation. Armed with more data and insight, we may be able to come up with a flexible solution that is a win-win for both of us.

We may in fact discount the price. We might give them longer payment terms or structure the payments across two quarterly budget periods. We may offer the discount on the basis of a volume purchase.

All of this sounds simple enough, but when salespeople hear “the price is too high” they go blank and forget the basics. The job of the salesperson is to serve the client and that means to clearly understand the client’s situation. The only way to do that is to ask questions. It is not to be annoying, pigheaded, stubborn or inflexible. Quite the opposite. We are here to solve the client’s problem and we have to do that in an arrangement, that is a win-win for both of us.