Episode #82: Presenting In Business In Japan

Japan has some particular ways of doing things. We say "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". That would be extremely bad advice when it comes to presenting your solution to buyers here. Japan is the country of Zen, which holds simplicity at it's centre. You would never know that though, when you look at typical business presentations. The slide deck is a mess. There are slides with five different colours on offer. You will see four to five different fonts on the same screen. The text will be dense, small font sizes and impenetrable. If there are four graphs, then they are all shown on the same slide.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, when one of my team showed me the slide deck from a recent presentation he attended. This event hosted by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, had about 150 hopefuls in the audience, keen and eager to learn how to do presentations properly. The instructor was a Japanese business consultant and his slides were terrible. There were too many details on each slide, too much text, too many diagrams cobbled together on screen. He was using four different fonts on each slide. It was ugly and hard to follow. He was someone, supposedly an expert on presentations, showing the faithful how to do it. Sadly the lack of knowledge here on how to present is legendary.

I had been asked to give a series of presentations for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government on how to start a business in Japan. They showed me what the previous speaker, a Japanese business women had been using. I just laughed to myself when I saw it. It was florid, drenched in too many colours, too small sized fonts, too much text, a total disaster as far as a professional business presentation goes. The officials at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government obviously thought that this mess passed muster. How could that be?

I don't know why because this is the country of high aesthetics of zen simplicity? If you ever take a careful look at a Japanese kimono, however you will find an amazing array of colours juxtaposed together. Often these colours don't seem to go together, as far as Western concepts of colour spectrum matching goes. Maybe there is more of a kimono mind at play here, than any zen sensibilities?

Even smart people do the craziest things. One of my ex-staff now works for a Robotics company founded by a mad professor type. The founder is very, very smart. I attended his presentation and boy oh boy where did the smarts go? The slide show was the same thing. Too many colours, too much information crammed onto one slide, totally dense and hard to follow. It was just overloaded with diagrams, detail and graphs. So don't follow the Japanese model, instead do professional presentations, be concise, precise, clear, sparse.

Also in Japan, it is quite common for people to sit down when they present. You will find they have prepared a desk, chair and low microphone stand for you. Don't follow this pattern. Stand up so that you can position yourself on the audience left of the screen. We want them looking at our face first, then reading left to right across the screen. We know that our face is the most powerful tool there is, when it comes to presentations and we want to be in the best position to use it. Also when we stand up ,we get to use the full capacity of our body language to drive home the key points we want to make.

In Japan however, if you stand above the audience, it is implying your eminent superiority over all of those sitting. Well you simply can't imply that with buyers, because they are God and there is nothing higher than them. So you need to make an apology that you are going to stand up, but explain that this will make it easier for you to give the presentation. Now this applies to foreigners and to Japanese alike.

The key is stand up, but apologise first, so you can get permission to not sit when presenting. For foreigners, we are freed up from a lot of restrictive conventions to do with the culture, because they just think we are ignorant and don't know any better. This apology idea though, travels very well across audiences and across nationalities. Even if you have Japanese team members doing the presentation in Japanese, get them to apologise and stand up and present.

If you are presenting to a buying group do not just imagine you can engage with the main person and do the deal. The way decisions are taken here, there will be all of the stakeholders in the room. Few people will want to say “yes” to anything new because that is risky, so they are there to make sure this is safe or to make sure it doesn't happen. You need to engage everyone.

Don't make the beginners mistake of talking to the person with the best English. They are rarely the decision maker. They are just a minion who is there, because they have good English. Engage with everyone, just as you should be doing in any presentation.

If you are using consecutive interpreting you need to learn how to speak in brackets. Speak part of your thought, stop, wait until the interpreting has finished, pick up the thought and continue. This may sound easy, but trust me it is not easy at all. Your thought process can get hijacked during the consecutive interpreting break and you lose your train of thought or you go off on some unintended tangent.

One of the best people I ever saw using consecutive interpreting was Murray Rose. He was a swimming icon in Australia, multiple Olympic medalist and a boyhood hero of mine. I had the pleasure to meet him when I was Consul General for Australia in Osaka. He was here to promote the Sydney Olympics.

He gave the most impressive and moving speech on the meaning of the Olympics. I can tell you it brought a tear to my eye it was so sincere and Aussie boys don’t cry. I wish we had been smart enough to record it. The other thing that struck me was how skilled he was to start a thought, hold it and continue perfectly. That takes work. You also have to remember not to talk for too long. You need to give the interpreter a chance to remember what you said so they can repeat it. You often see people who are not used to interpreters waxing long and lyrically, completely forgetting the talk now has to be switched into Japanese. The interpreter just cannot retain that much detail, so whatever you said will only be partially transferred to the listeners. Go for short brackets so that nothing is lost.