Episode #10 Japanese Elites Who Can't Cut It

Imagine the consequences when you combine dead data with a dead delivery? You have a massive bromide of frightening winter surf Hawaiian North Shore proportions, thundering down to bludgeon unsuspecting audiences into stupefaction. I was one of the bludgeoned in that audience that day and it was dreadful. Are these people really elite, I was left thinking?

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

Dentsu the advertising giant has announced it will trim its working hours by 20%. From a high of 2,252 hours per year in 2014 or 45 hours a week (assuming a 50 week work year), Dentsu is aiming for 1,800 hours per employee annually or 36 hours a week by March 2020. It will also ban working between 10.00pm and 5.00am. This was in response to the suicide of Matsuri Takahashi aged 24 who jumped to her death from her dormitory on Christmas day 2015 because she was depressed from all the illegal overtime work hours she was made to put in. The suicide was determined to be a case of karoshi or death from overwork. She was putting in 100 hours per month in illegal overtime. Prosecutors said there 1400 other Dentsu employees also working above the overtime limit. Dentsu President Toshihiro Yamamoto appeared in court for Dentsu’s trial over suspected labour violations. They were fined 500,000 yen or around $4500. Has justice been served – what do you think?

This is episode number 10 and we are talking about Japanese Elites Who Can’t Cut It.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

Society approves titles and status, especially in Japan. We rise through the ranks and following the Peter Principle, we peak at our upper level of incompetence. On the way up, we pick up titles and accrue status, respect and credence amplified through the power of our title. Our personal power though could be suddenly exposed as bogus, when we get up to open our mouths in public. This is one of those “The Emperor Has No Clothes” moments, when all is revealed, and we are found severely wanting.

I was at a function recently and one of the bureaucratic elite in Japan was there to give a keynote presentation. You generally get to become an elite official in Japan because you went to the right elementary school, middle school, high school and then the most elite of the Universities. The reason these were the right schools up until University, is because they have the absolute best system in place to help you become a legend in memorization, rote learning and test taking. At University you take a couple of years off, before you start cramming for the national selection exam, where again memory and exam technique are the most rewarded skills.. this is when

You join a Ministry and work like a dog for a squillion hours every day, for years, simultaneously looking for a powerful patron to whom you can pledge total loyalty. After decades of glacial progress, you emerge a grey haired, elite official. Now part of the bureaucratic upper crust, you are often called upon to represent your organization and speak in public. This is when the whole edifice comes crashing down.

This was the case with this official – sent out into the firing line to promulgate the new way forward for his political masters, to impress everyone with the potency of their new policies, to win adherents to the path forward. The result - total fizzer.

Why? Because he spoke without energy or passion. He showed us nothing to indicate he felt at all impressed with the potency of his own recommendations. He looked down at his papers the whole time and hardly glanced at the audience. The opportunity to make eye contact, to combine words with the power of his face and to use variations available to his voice through speed and power, were in total absence.

He was a truly dull correspondent and we were completely dulled to his message. There were no converts to the cause that day. He could return to his desk and tick the box though – the task was completed, a total failure, but completed.

Astonishingly, during the post speech Q&A session, I noticed he perked up like man really engaged. Sadly it was only sustained for 30 seconds, but it showed he could do it.

I was wondering why didn't he energise the audience while he commanded the stage? He could actually do it. We all saw that he had the capacity. I believe he didn’t do it because he had no concept and no appreciation for the immense power at his beck and call. His self-concept seemed to be that he was just a grey bureaucrat, whose job was to be grey and boring. Obviously he had received no training or preparation for his task. So his brilliant university pedigree meant little, when he was publically outed at the podium. He was a total failure as a communicator, he became a message killer, a brand assassin instead. He took the whole programme backwards not forwards.

Was he an exception, a one-off, the runt of the litter among the bureaucratic ranks of the gifted, great and plausible public speakers? I would love to report that he was an outlier, an exception, a bad apple. No, I can’t do that. He was typical of that bevy of elite officials, who are mainly all acquired status and have almost no personal power projection whatsoever.

Let me be fair and point out that Japan is not the only place where the elite run out of gas and are left stranded by the side of the road of bureaucratic progress. Another vaunted profession is that of the elite government official who works in the foreign service of their country. This was a bad week for me, as I suffered more of the same elite incompetence, this time from an Ambassador. He was a lovely guy, but hopeless as a representative of his nation.

You would think that given the high profile nature of their job, they would be experts in promoting their countries. No, this was another national reputation suicide effort.

Monotone, weak voice sputtering forth Ums and Ahs aplenty, with no engagement with the countries fans here in Japan. A voice that sounded so very weary and where the last three to four words in every sentence, just slowly petered out. The energy and tone of his voice just subsided, guaranteeing the key message was a total downer, regardless of the actual content of the words. When what we say is not congruent with how we say it, we lose 93% of the message. The audience get distracted by how we look and how we sound. What we are saying is just not registering.

Was this a one off – just the Ambo having a bad day?

Actually no, it wasn’t the Ambo’s rare bad day. I have seen this gentleman in action on many occasions and there is a scary consistency to his public speaking murder of his country’s brand. He is not unusual. In my 31 years of survey here, I have found that most Ambassadors are hopeless public speakers. Yes, yes, there are some exceptions, but they just prove the rule. If you doubt what I say, then please send me a list of more than 10 Ambassadors you know who are any good?.

Do these career diplomats get proper training in the art of public speaking? Astoundingly no they don’t! They become elite government officials due to their ability to write cables and reports, which usually almost no one reads, by the way. They have large analytical abilities and very big brains. They can really shine is small meetings, where they can one up their rivals and be the smartest intellect in the room.

So they get promoted and then get propelled to the front of the stage, handed the microphone and away they go into ineptitude, writ large under lights, in front of the assembled masses. The good thing is that all of their colleagues are equally hopeless, so it seems normal to them. The fundamental error is they simply don’t value having a skilled public presentation facility. They miss the opportunity to establish a powerful, positive image of their country.

The worst public speaking experience of my diplomatic career was giving a speech on behalf of one of our Ambassadors. I was “our man in Osaka” and had to deliver the speech on his behalf because he couldn’t make it. The talk was in Japanese, which was no issue, as I had given around 400 public speeches in Japanese.

The content however was challenging. There are four main types of speeches – to inform, to persuade, to entertain and to impress. Foreign Ministries around the world, tend to love the data dump, inform variety. This automatically leads to lots of dull information being imparted to the punters. Why they don’t go for the persuade type is a bit of a mystery to me and all countries seem to make that inform rather than persuade selection. I absolutely gave it my best shot to liven it up, while sticking religiously to the approved Ambassadorial text, but what torture it was!

Imagine when you combine dead data with a dead delivery? You have a massive bromide of frightening winter surf Hawaiian North Shore proportions, thundering down to bludgeon unsuspecting audiences into stupefaction. This is what we usually get from elite Government officials. It doesn't have to be like that.

There are some bright spots of hope though, even in Japan! Previous Ambassador Motohiko Nishimura, who I met in Osaka in the mid-1990s, during his posting to the Kansai - yes, Kansai is considered a foreign country by Tokyo, so they have to send an Ambassador down there,- was skilled and excellent. English or Japanese, it did not matter, he was the consummate diplomat in the sense he could use his speaking power, to capture an audience and have them love Japan. He finished his career as Ambassador to Portugal, and I am sure he was a tremendous asset for his country in creating support for Japan there.

Hello to all of you elite officials and aspirants out there, stop boring us all to death, get some proper training and represent your Ministries with aplomb. Boys and girls – be ambitious? No, be persuasive!