The Presentations Japan Series

Remote work is a sticky concept. Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home. Tokyo commutes are a shocker. Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There is a need for in-person teamwork and finding the balance between remote days and days in the office is a hot topic at the moment and will continue to be so.

Internal and external meetings will need to be conducted remotely. We are entering the hybrid world where some of the team are in the same office meeting room and everyone else is at home connecting remotely. This will spill over to meetings with clients. Japan is always a country where there is a surprising number of people required for the meeting on the client side. I can't count the number of times when there was just me on one side of the table and host of people on the other, with me wondering why are there so many required for this meeting? That will continue in the remote world and in the hybrid meeting world too.

This presents a number of problems. Engaging our audiences online and in the room are both difficult thanks to the technology. When groups gather in a room for the meeting, there is normally one camera to cover all. There are some tools available like the Owl which uses multiple cameras covering 360 degrees, to show who is speaking on the screen for those who are remote. This is good, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, because it suits small groups gathered in a U-shape. Sound is the issue here. Usually there are one or two of those UFO looking microphones on the desk to pick up the audio and in my experience they are never quite satisfactory. It is also very frustrating when those in the room react to an unintelligible remark and start laughing, while those beaming in remotely have no clue what is going on. This really divides the group into first and second class citizens very quickly.

The other problem, which despite everyone working with the technology for the last number of years, is that few people still understand how to use the camera. In a meeting room with one shared camera it is difficult, because the distance to the people speaking is quite far and with a wide shot, we don't feel any connection with them. The Owl and similar technology can help, but I haven't seen too many firms bothering to use it when they already have installed one camera at the front of the room.

For those joining remotely, they invariably fail to look at the camera at all and are looking down at the faces on the screen. This is understandable, because we are trained to look at people faces and this is where all the body language information is located. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the people though, because our eyes are downcast. We are looking at the middle of the screen, rather than at the green dot, which is where the camera is located on the top of the laptop. When we ignore the people's faces on screen and talk directly to the green dot, we are now engaging directly with the audience because they see us looking straight at them. For the speaker though, it is not very satisfying, because there is no sense of strong personal bond between us and the audience faces on screen, so we feel disconnected.

To add to the already heightened degree of difficulty, when we introduce slides, the speaker becomes this person trapped in a tiny little box on the screen. We cannot really see them very well, so the personal relationship is lost. Normally when we are presenting, our face, voice and gestures are critical to being persuasive, but when virtual we are robbed of two of the elements. We only have our voice to work with. Sadly, very few people understand the importance of how to use modulation, pauses and speed control for emphasis when speaking. Take note next time you hear people giving a talk or in a virtual meeting. The tendency is to put the same amount of speed and strength behind every word. Boring and often monotonous.

In fact, we need to use pauses more in the remote world, to allow people the people listening to follow what we are saying. Also, we purposely hit key words with more power and this is a must, if we want to lift certain key words in the understanding of our audience. This is not a word democracy. Not every word has the same value in a sentence. Most people who are not trained properly give each word gets the same emphasis treatment, so there is no differentiation.

Do we really need to have the slides up all of the time? If we can stop sharing the screen as often as possible and present ourselves in full screen mode that is best. Yes, that may mean a bit of switching between getting the slide deck up again and alternating between it and ourselves, but this is the way for us to have more impact. Being on full screen allows us to employ gestures, however limited and also to make the best use of our facial expressions. These are very powerful in driving home our point and communicating our message.

Having the camera at eye height would seem to be an obvious thing, but I still see so many people just resting the laptop on the table in front of them. Why shooting up one's nose is thought to be professional or attractive is a mystery to me, but a lot of people have zero self-awareness and continue to make this most basic of mistakes. We want to get that camera at eye height, so we can make it easier to ignore what is going on in the main screen and just engage each person directly through the camera.

If people don't work these things out, we will all be treated to desultory presentations for the remainder of our working careers. That thought sends a shiver up my spine, I can tell you. Or can we all get back to the understanding that this remote medium has its own idiosyncrasies and we have to master them, because this medium isn't going away.

I hope they can come up with a technology solution that give us the type of effect you can have with a teleprompter, where you can be looking straight at the camera in the middle of the screen, rather than just the green dot, which is mounted at the top. That would help us all to be better able to engage the people on screen with great eye contact and improve our communication effectiveness. Until the technology catches up, let's get to work on what we can control and be a professional when in person and when beaming in virtually.

I teach presentation skills to businesspeople. In the first class they do a simple self-introduction and this is where we instructors can tell the skill level of the people in the class. A recent class had quite competent people and I am sure they would have been seen as already quite good by their peers and bosses. At the end of the class on the next day, they were transformed into a completely different, highly persuasive and skilled presenter. I was thinking what was the difference? They were by all measures fairly good when they arrived into the class. The obvious answer was the coaching they received, but why did that make such a major difference and can we get better at presenting by ourselves without coaching?

There are books on presenting and I have written one called "Japan Presentation's Mastery" and there are millions of others. There are tons of videos on presenting and I release two a week, one called "The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" which covers leadership, sales and presenting. The other show is called the "Japan Business Mastery Show" and it covers the same content, but in a more abbreviated version for people with no time. There are no doubt a lot of podcasts on the subject and I release this one "The Presentations Japan Series" every week. What I am saying is there are no shortage of resources on how to become a better presenter and I am doing my best to create content for Japan as my niche.

If you absorb all the content available there is no doubt you will become a better presenter. But will it make you a great presenter? To become great, I believe you need two things – lots of presenting opportunities and quality coaching from experts. I forget which Tony Robbins book it was I was reading, but I remember he made the conscious decision to do as much presenting as he could, in order to master the art. I thought that made sense and I certainly grabbed every opportunity after I came back to Japan to work in 1992 to give presentations.

Things have gone quiet since Covid, as there were no events, but still I am up to presentation number 548. I tried to incorporate what I was studying into my talks and also to note what was working for me and what was not. Over three decades I have built up the experience now to be very comfortable speaking and presenting. My TED talk last year did push me though, because it is very short at 13 minutes and the video goes global. If you are doing a poor job, a lot of people know about it. I also don't count my presentations given as a corporate trainer, because that is not a public speech style presentation and has a different goal and cadence. It is still standing up in front of people and commanding the room though, but it is different, so I don't count the many thousands of those facilitations.

What about the coaching aspect? The coach provides options. We know what we know, but the coach can see more than what we can see. When you think about it you are facing the audience and looking at them and you cannot see yourself, unless you are videoing the talk (and I strongly recommend you do that every possible chance). The coach can see the impact we are having and can help us to ramp that up.

It might be more voice variety and modulation. It might be larger gestures. I might be to start moving around or to stand on the one spot and not move. It might be to get us working on engaging our audience members through using eye contact and holding their gaze as we speak to them.

It might be to inject pauses to slow things down. If we are nervous or even if we are on a roll, we might be speeding up. When this happens, each successive wave of ideas wipes out the previous one and the audience can get a bit lost trying to keep up. The pauses allow them to digest what we are saying and get them ready for the next pearls of wisdom. They also allow us to adjust our speaking speed and slow down.

The coach can mention to us that we have a very serious look on our face, because we are concentrating so hard and it comes across as aggressive or angry and that isn't the image we want to project. We don't notice we are doing that because we are consumed with the message and the delivery and are oblivious to the how we look to the audience.

The coach can also encourage us to take some risks. They can suggest things which are outside our usual gamut, but which when incorporated will enable us to lift our presentation to a higher height than we could imagine by ourselves. Sometimes we need to stretch ourselves so that we can make a bigger action in the talk and have it within the bounds of business relevancy. The coach can help us to escape from our Comfort Zone and challenge us to be more and be better.

My recommendation is to absorb as much knowledge and information as you can about presenting, get as much frequent practice as you can manage and get a quality coach. That is the winning combination. Remember we are all putting out personal and professional brands out there every time we open our mouths to speak. Do we want to be perceived as true professionals and in that way build trust and credibility? Of course we do, so that is why this trifecta is such a winner.

This Japanese saying the "frog in the well doesn't know the ocean" is a favourite. When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells. We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good. Without understanding the process, our expectations are getting conditioned to mediocrity.

When we are growing up, we are usually not exposed to great speakers. High School teachers are unexciting speakers. Politicians on television are normally underwhelming, doing their best to avoid answering the questions or recommending anything too strategic, in case there is an electoral backlash. They are all looking for the middle of the middle. Our professors at Uni do a lot of public speaking, except you would never know that judging by how they deliver their lectures. The speakers invited to the degree graduation ceremony are normally dull dogs. When we get into business, we rarely encounter much professionalism around presenting. It is field of frogs croaking in their wells.

A few decades of this and you are done. If we want to lift our game, increase our persuasion power, we need to get out of the well and start exploring the ocean. Persuasion power is absolutely required. The amount of data and information coming at all of us on a daily basis is staggering. Traditional media and social media are conspiring to drown us with sheer volume. How do we cut through all of that dross and white noise and register with our audience when it is our turn to communicate? We need to be crafting our messages using storytelling and backing it up with solid and relevant data. Just a big data dump, no matter how good the data is, won't cut it anymore. Audiences today have micro-concentration spans and also way too many options to escape from us. If we are just reproducing the same old same old from decades ago, we are kidding ourselves. The good news is it is all getting better for us.

What is amazing today is how easy it is to expose ourselves to the best speakers. Content marketing requires that we all put our goods up on display so that potential buyers can see how good we are and if we have what they want. This means it is all out there for free to sample. YouTube and other platforms allow us to search out content we are interested in and find people who are knowledgeable and within that group find out the top communicators to follow. Search engines can help us to locate content from people who we know are renowned skilled speakers and we can usually access their talks easily and for free. TED talks vary of course in quality and the format is rather limited to short presentations of under 15 minutes. There are just so many available though, with a bit of searching, we can find the best content. In our local areas there will be a broad number of organisations sponsoring talks. In Tokyo there are a number of Chambers of Commerce which are running talks all of the time. If you are a Rotarian like me, then at least once a week, you are listening to a speech by some notable.

So, we have a cornucopia of options to observe and learn. Now we hit the main barrier. Having the ability to access the ocean and doing anything about it though, are different things. We just keep in our lane and we don't devote the time to exposing ourselves to the best of what is available. We can learn from what is working and also from what is a train wreck, a shambles, a catastrophe. Learning what not to do is also a valuable lesson and there are scores of instructors available in that regard.

We are all feeling pressed for time, but actually we have a lot of time. If we take out working and sleeping, our available time for study is still sufficient, quite sufficient. The choices we make determine how far we move forward. Accepting that persuasion power is a fundamental requirement, you could argue a duty for people in business. If that is the case, then we need to make the priority to access all of the available resources and work on improving our knowledge and understanding.

If we only watched one of the top speakers for an hour a week and took extensive notes and then referred to those notes before we contemplated making a speech, then we would be in the top 1% of presenters immediately. This is only because most people don't do anything and what they do do is pretty dull and awful. Presenting is the bastion of scoundrels for the most part, so devoting time to build the skills makes us stand above and apart from the rabble very quickly.

I am a hoarder. I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations. I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one. Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years. This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and that is you face the dilemma of how much content to use and which content to select. Having given 548 public speeches so far, you would think I would have this problem under control by now. I am a glutton though for data and cool images and this sea of information gets harder and harder to swim through.

Invariably, I select way too many slides. Trying to prune them though is tough, because we can fall in love with the quality of our research or our numbers. The intentions are admirable. We want to deliver the highest quality content to our audience and so the pruning shears are not being wielded vigorously enough. Dropping out slides has a certain amount of pain attached to it, so the discipline to do it is definitely required. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the time limit we face for the presentation. We get caught up in the logistics of slide selection and other important aspects get missed.

One of my pet peeves with presenters is when they have bitten off more than they can chew and the last 20 slides are raced through or skipped at the end, because they have messed up their time control. We feel cheated. Here is some valuable information being whizzed through and we would like to know some more about these slides but we never will. We are trading our time for value, yet due to the speaker's ineptitude we are not getting the full value of the transaction. So there are definitely brand damage elements to doing this and we should all avoid these every time.

Another casualty is we spend all the time on the slides and nothing on the rehearsal. Here is the irony. If we had spent some time in rehearsal we would have immediately realised we had too much material for the time allotted. This happened to me when I did my TED talk. I had prepared eight chapters for that talk, but in rehearsal, I realised I had to axe the last chapter or risk trying to rush it all through. One of the downsides of TED talks is that they are shown globally, basically forever. If you make a mess of it then that knowledge isn't limited to the 100 people in the room, as per a normal talk, it now goes out to millions who see what a dill you are. So rushing it through would be a bad choice and cutting stuff out is the better option.

A lot of the time we are showing data, because we feel this is valuable information for the audience. That means slide after slide of numbers, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs etc. This can get very dull very quickly. Also, we tend to not remember the tsunami of numbers either, so is there much point to doing it this way? Being more selective on some key numbers would make more sense and help to cut down the pressure on time. Rather than just relying on visuals to make the point, we can use storytelling as well to really drive home the relevance of the numbers.

Let me use an example of Voice Of Customer scores. Say we are trying to highlight our positive reaction from our buyers for our product or service and we are referring to scores out of 100. We could just show trend over time and make a comment about the direction of the trend. Additionally, we could add in a story about the numbers. If we had a number like 72% for the Voice of Customer score, on the face of it, that isn't particularly remarkable. We could make the comment that Japanese buyers are hard markers. Or we could go further and tell a story about the luxury goods industry in Japan which has a permanent dilemma. When buyers in Japan are surveyed on their happiness, the scores are substantially below similar surveys in the rest of the world. The luxury goods companies initially thought they had a problem in Japan, but what they found was the scores for their firms' products and services were consistently lower than other markets. Ultimately, to make sense of the comparative scores they started adding in up to 30% additional scores to compensate for the Japanese buyer's lower scoring scale. So that miserable 72% score actually represented 93.6%, which was more in line with other surveys in other countries.

It takes more time to tell a story like that, rather than just show a number like 72%, but the story is memorable and people will remember that long after the talk is over. So we have to allow time to wrap some numbers up in stories in our talks, which means we have to axe other slide darlings. We are providing more value in this way, because the audience will recall the key points more easily and so the time trade off is definitely worth it. So when you are thinking about creating your power collection of slides, stop right there. Instead think about which slides lend themselves well to storytelling. Absolutely do the rehearsal to be able to gauge how much time you have available to show the slides and tell the stories. If you do that, then the whole presentation will accentuate your personal and professional brands.

I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio's Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling. Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller's confidence and belief in what they were proposing. Being an arrogant presenter isn't going to a formula for success with your audience, so I don't recommend that route. Being confident however is certainly a winner in the persuasion stakes. Think about it though, how many of the people you have seen presenting looked totally confident? I would vouch not too many.

If this is such an important attribute when presenting and it makes perfect sense irrespective of any research on the matter, then why isn't everyone when presenting doing their best to project confidence? The pendulum tends to sit in the middle. Not too hot and not too cold and so the presentation and the presenter both become instantly forgettable. Vanilla style efforts are a formula for obscurity. This is ironic really because often the intention is to increase the presenter's profile and raise the levels of business credibility being attached to the speaker. These are important motivations to go to the trouble to prepare a talk and to put one's personal and professional brands out on display for all to evaluate.

How can we project more confidence when presenting? It sounds too simplistic, but speak louder than normal. We have to separate our normal work day roles from our speaker role. We cannot give our talk as if we were chatting over coffee with our colleague. We have a different set of responsibilities now and we have a greater profile to boot. The effort to speak louder forces us to raise our energy levels. This now sets up a transmission of our energy from our position on the stage to the audience members seated in front of us. They can feel the energy we are projecting. I don't mean shouting or screaming, but I do mean trying to "throw" your voice. One thing to help with this is to try and project your voice to the farthest wall not just to the audience members seated in front of you. Having that distance objective in mind will help to raise your energy level and also your connection with the audience.

Another simplistic sounding piece of advice would be to look at your audience. In Japan we don't make direct eye contact very often, because it is considered to be confronting. Again, there is a difference between chatting with a colleague over coffee while not staring them straight in the eye and giving a business presentation. The roles are different and we have to accept that construct. When we are the speaker we want to stare straight into the eyes of our audience.

The way to do this is to regulate the length of the eye contact. Three or four seconds is too short because it doesn't allow us to make that one-on-one personal connection. If we start holding the eye contact for over seven or eight seconds then the connectivity bridges across into axe murderer, psycho maniac levels of intrusion. It is too much and it makes people feel very uncomfortable in Japan. Around six seconds gives us enough connection without too much pressure. Living in Japan beats the direct eye contact power out of you, so it takes a bit of concentration to suspend the usual societal norms and start making eye contact with strangers. I would notice it when I went home to Australia and I would find myself avoiding making direct eye contact with people, through force of habit from living here in Nippon for so long. So it requires confidence and guts in Japan to make eye contact with others in a public forum such as a speech.

When we make the eye contact, we have one thing in our mind. We want to have the person we are looking at feel as if it were just the two of us in this room and that we are giving them our full concentration. After about six seconds we shift our gaze to the next person and then we repeat the exercise. In a forty-minute speech, we could make one-on-one eye contact with four hundred people. In other words, we could connect with every single member of the audience in most cases and with smaller audiences, we could do this multiple times.

We want to be unpredictable with our eye contact, so we should mix it up, rather than moving along the rows of seated audience members in a linear fashion. We do this to keep our audience members on their toes and not allow them to zone us out and daydream about picking up the dry cleaning or whatever it is they need to be doing after this talk. Having the speaker suddenly fix their eyes on you and stare at you while they are talking, definitely wakes you up.

So if we can just change up two things – the power of our voice and eye contact – we can make a big difference to how we are being perceived by the audience. That high level of confidence will translate into the listeners being more open to believing what we are saying.

How do we want to be perceived when we give our talk? What constitutes the personal and professional brand we are creating? How can we master the first impression? Often we are not thinking about these things at all. We are too busy piecing together the slide deck puzzle we will use during the presentation. Perception, personal brand, first impressions are a thousand miles away thoughts, as we tinker with the visuals. What a big mistake.

Whether we like it or not, the audience will form an impression of us, they will perceive something about us as a presenter and they will make a judgement about our brand – for good or bad. Given all of this is going to happen anyway, we should make a decision on all three fronts and determine the outcomes we want, rather than leaving it to chance or random luck.

Planning the talk is important, although for a lot of presenters that stops at the complexity level of the decisions about the order of the slides and not much more. We should start our planning with the outcome in mind. How do we want to be perceived? Take a moment and start writing down the type of perceptions you want to enjoy after the talk. It will probably be an easy list to assemble – "I want to be seen as professional, competent, clear, engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, etc." Now make a new list about what constitutes your personal brand.

In my case, it means how I dress, because that is often the trigger for those all important silent first perceptions about who I am. So it is always an expensive Italian suit, usually Zegna and always worn with the top jacket button done up. It means French Cuff shirts, so that I can wear cufflinks, it means a pocket chief to be an accent to the silk tie. The Italian leather shoes often have a brogue pattern and the shine should always be mirror like. The hair always trimmed and neat.

Basically, I am trying to convey that what we do is deliver quality solutions. We do this with great attention to detail and we are reliable and by just looking at me, you can see that is true. If I turn up dishevelled, everything a complete mess, then the audience may draw the conclusion I or my organisation cannot be trusted with their business. Boris Johnson was able to pull off total dishevelment and still become the UK PM, but I lack his wit, charm, erudition and vocabulary.

First impressions also means how I come across. For me this usually means lots of energy and dynamism. It means using a lot of eye contact with the audience and trying to meet as many people as possible, before I give the actual talk, to create that personal connection. It means getting there early and checking the name badges or the attendee list, to recall any of those pesky names of faces that I have met previously and to look for people I want to meet. Like most people, name remembering is a struggle, so a bit of early arrival name badge checking goes a long way to remedy that character flaw.

In my case with regard to perceptions and brand, I want to come across as dynamic and powerful, so the very start of the talk is critical to deliver that impression. When my name is called, I move quickly and confidently to the middle of the stage and do not spend even one second finessing the laptop to get the slides up. I leave that to others to take care of, so that I can take care of my audience and get proceedings underway immediately and start delivering value. I am already set up with a lavalier microphone. This allows me to free up my hands for gestures when I need them to come forth to accentuate a point I am making. We only have a few seconds available to cement that first impression and wasting it on playing around with the equipment is a big fail. There are many ways to open a speech and I will have chosen one suitable for thAT particular audience in attendance on that day.

Now it is quite possible that your audience may require an entirely different persona as a speaker. It may require a very soft, calm, quiet approach, taking a lot of the energy down a few levels and dropping the decibel level of the voice projection as well. The stage entry might need to be slower and more deliberate, calmer and more considered. If that is the case, then I switch gears and deliver accordingly. For example, if the audience were in their teens or in their eighties, we would think about what would resonate best with them and then adjust our approach accordingly. It makes sense doesn't it.

However, is this a fake presentation and are we fraudsters, if we switch gears like this? No, but it is a calculation of how to match the needs of the audience, rather than satisfying our own needs. This delivery may need less dynamism, volume and gestures and more pauses for reflection. Is this still within my brand guidelines? Yes, it is, because I choose it to be a broad tent, to accommodate my brand. The dress part may not change all that much, except perhaps the intensity of the tie and pocket chief combination, but everything else remains pretty much the same.

The key point is to consider how you need to arrange your brand and your first five minutes for that particular audience. If you give the presentations only as you like to give them, then that will work with a certain proportion of the audience who are more like you. It will however fail to resonate with a large swathe of the audience who you still want to reach with your message. The planning is the key to get this right. Thinking about who you are speaking to, what initial impression you want to form, how you want to be perceived and what is the personal brand you are projecting, are all key elements of that planning process. This shouldn't happen by chance, it should be a product of your design.

Recency is a simple concept to understand. It basically means that we are all simple beings and we tend to remember best what we heard last. Given this is so simple, you would think that presenters would be masters of the wrap up. Not so. I am always amazed at how often speakers allow the final impression to crash and burn through neglect. What do I mean by neglect? They are missing in action when it came to the planning of the final impression and they are also underperforming in the delivery of the last section of their talk. So often the voice mouthing the words of the last sentence just trails off and dies a slow death.

If we understand the importance of recency and the critical nature of determining our final impression, then we will carefully plan for it. Often, the speakers are trying to stuff too much material into the time allotted, so you see that pathetic mad rush at the end. They start apologising and begin skipping through the slide deck like they have been snorting cocaine, because they have grossly miscalculated the time. As audience members we feel totally short changed and cheated. Some of those final slides looked very valuable and we see we are not going to get what we came here for, because the speaker was so inept.

They manage to complete the catastrophe by allowing their final sentence to just trail off into oblivion, as they suck all of the energy out of the room, dribbling out the finish. The end is a massive anti-climax and the whole presentation lands with a massive thud, as it fails on so many levels.

The planning process has one hugely significant contingent and that is the accompanying rehearsal time. This is when you discover you have too much material for the time you have been given to deliver the presentation. It is painful to cuts bits off the flesh of the corpus of the talk, but you need to be surgical about it and trim, trim, trim until you get down to presenting only the richest residue.

The planning process also allows you to work out what you need to say after the end of the Q&A. Remember, the Q&A is a street fight – there are no rules. Anyone in the audience can take the whole talk off topic with their dubious question. Suddenly the recency is at risk of being disconnected from what you have been talking about and the final impression is focused on their question. Everyone has forgotten all about the main body of your talk. Your message has potentially been supplanted by something irrelevant to the topic.

We need to have decided our key message right at the start of the planning and that becomes the frame around which we build the talk conjuring up the most powerful and relevant evidence. In the last five minutes we do a couple of things. We reiterate our key message and we do this slowly, being in no haste, because we have rehearsed and we have allowed enough time to finish in a relaxed and professional manner. We take our time and we again try to connect this message to the audience and how it will help them. We try to draw out its relevancy for their work. We might be throwing down a challenge to the audience to institute what we are suggesting and attempting to get them to take specific actions after this talk.

We are purposely slowing down the pace, talking slowly and employing pregnant pauses to allow the listeners to digest and contemplate what we are saying. Contrast this with the mad rush through the slide deck by the disorganised speaker who is in a mad panic

to run faster off the cliff, because they didn't plan and didn't rehearse. Instead, we are relaxed and in perfect control, as we lull the audience into a psychologically safe place, before we lower the boom.

As we get to the completion of the talk, we start to inject energy, conviction and power into our voice and body. We start to build to a crescendo, combining body language, eye contact, voice and gestures. This is a combination of all the tools available to us, which accentuates our message and our final impression. Our audience buys belief, confidence and commitment and our job is to make sure this is the final impression they have of us. None of this is left to chance. We plan it, we rehearse it and then we deliver it with a flawless execution. It doesn't come across as canned though and instead seems a spontaneous eruption of passion for our message. Start with the intention to finish like this and your talks will be so much more memorable than others. Your personal and professional brands will soar while others will just disappear from collective memory. People will remember you and will remain impressed well after the event has finished.

It seems logical that any presentation we are giving is ours. Well, that is sort of correct, but what I am talking about is making it reflect your style and personality. When you talk to people about being a leader, they often bring up the word "authentic", but when you talk to people about presenting, few ever mention that word. They are focused on being easily understood, convincing, concise, memorable etc. Being yourself should be the default, but somehow many people get wrapped up in being the "presenter", as if it is a role they are playing.

I totally agree that the presenter role is a thing. What I usually tell the Japanese participants in our classes is that when you are presenting you have a different set of responsibilities. When having a chat with your friend over coffee, you can talk in a soft voice and not project any great energy. However, when you are up on stage, that is a different set of responsibilities. The volume has to be sufficient that no one in the audience is struggling to hear what you are saying. Of course, you might be thinking, what is the issue, we all have microphones today. True, but have you ever noticed that many people have no clue how to handle the technology. They hold it down way to too low relative to their mouth or they strangle it, by placing their hand over the mesh, which is specifically designed to pick up the sound.

The energy part is also important. We buy enthusiasm and confidence and the amount of buying going on is in direct proportion to the amount of energy being projected. What if I am a low energy person, aren't I being authentic to speak with low energy - isn't that who I am? The answer here is that you should give up any ideas about being a speaker, because there is a range of skills and mindset required to do the job well. If you don't have those skills and the right mindset, why do we have to listen to you, when we can listen someone who is more professional.

We have to be ourselves but be our professional selves, not our train wreck selves. What I am talking about is operating at a high level of skill and bringing aspects of your personality into the presentation. Many presenters are stuck in low gear and they give a journeyman performance but we don't feel close to them or impressed by them. Being able to bring more of yourself means, not being afraid of adding a little flair when presenting.

I will contrast two presenters. I attended an event recently and the slides were well done, the presenter (I am his client by the way), was very well presented, his voice was clear and calm. That was the problem – it was calm. It wasn't energised or excited by the chance to share his content with the audience. The voice was clear but the tone was flat – it was a Johnny One Note performance which can be sleep inducing, if we get too much of it. He is the President of his firm and he should be the chief proselytiser, he should be projecting his confidence about what a great company they are and about all of the great things they can do for their clients. The demand for his company's services is strong, so maybe he doesn't feel any need to project anything, but that is a big mistake. Markets turn and he has a professional brand for himself, regardless of where he works.

Another presenter I saw brings all the clarity, professional slides etc., to the party but he also brings a lot of himself and all of his little idiosyncrasies as well. He brings all of the professionalism around the skill and mindset but also some of his personality. This is what makes him memorable. We associate the professionalism with his personal brand and he can take it one step further – he makes his talks entertaining. This is dangerous territory because being entertaining as a speaker is the hardest element in the speaking universe to pull off. The true professionals are just that – they are doing stand up for a living and the rest of us are amateurs delving into an area of great complexity. I am sure you have no shortage of recollections of speakers attempting to be humorous and just falling totally flat.

We don't need to be comedians, but we can allow aspects of our personalities to shine through which can be entertaining or at least work well in that environment. The speaker I was referencing isn't setting out to be humourous, but he is allowing his natural personality to come through and that makes his talks entertaining. I realise about myself that comedy is not in my future, so I don't even try it. I also realise that there are limits to how much I can loosen up on stage. I compensate for these weaknesses by being authentic, which in my case means being high energy, confident and powerful when presenting. Think about how you can be authentic, but also be skilled and memorable when on stage and not just fade into the wallpaper and become totally forgettable after the talk is finished.

I get this question quite often: "should I follow the logic of 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do' with regard to doing business with Japanese companies?". Their question is usually related to how to present to buyers. The Western "pitch deck" is usually well designed, professionally laid out and zen like in its simplicity. Ironically, the equivalent decks from companies in the land of zen, are usually more reminiscent of the Baroque period, highly ornate and florid in design. Polar opposites in fact. The style of the actual delivery of the decks is usually also a world apart and it is quite shocking when you first encounter this phenomenon. What should we be doing to be effective in winning business from Japanese companies?

Very, very occasionally, when teaching presentation skills here to Japanese people, we will encounter a preference for the "Japanese way" of presenting, rather than the global standard that we are advocating. What do they mean by the "Japanese way"? We should speak in a monotone, with no energy, have our back to the audience and read everything on the screen to those in the room. It also means having a slide with 5 different fonts and a similar number of colours, packed to gunwales with data. If using graphs is a good idea, then let's put up five on the one slide, so that everything is so tiny, you cannot make much sense of it. If proffering information is considered important, then let's affix vast slabs of impenetrable text to the slide and then read it to the audience. Another favourite is to put up the entire spreadsheet, packed with microscopic numbers in the cells. Just to spice it up, let's add some animation and have various bits move around.

Why are the Japanese decks and every other collection of information offered often so crammed and dense? I discovered the reason when I was a university student here in Tokyo. Back in 1979, I attended an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations, which was my chosen field of study at that time. One of the professors was relating a point about the difference in thinking between Chinese people and Japanese people. Zen travelled from India, through China to Japan and so at various points in history, Japanese Buddhist priests would go to China to study. There was an allegorical zen tale regarding a well and a bucket, which in the Chinese version, made a macro point about the condition of humanity in the world. The good Professor made the observation that when that allegorical tale was translated into Japanese, in addition to the macro point, there was a tremendous amount of micro detail about the construction of the well, how the rope was made, the dimensions of everything, etc., etc.

Japan Is A Data Consuming Tornado

This is the point – Japanese buyers have an insatiable need for data. You simply cannot oversupply data to a Japanese client and they will just keep sucking it up, like a tornado devours everything in its path. So, when we present our highly refined, trimmed down slide deck or submit our carefully manicured written proposal, the Japanese side often feels like they have just missed their lunch and are starving, ravenous for more information. Written materials in particular can be a problem. We are trained in the West to be succinct, to focus on the core information, to get to the point. Japan is just not that way.

The language itself is circuitous, vague and indirect. We are a bilingual operation here in Tokyo, so we are constantly switching between languages. Even after 37 years here, I am still amazed at how many more words are needed to express the same concept in Japanese than in English.

So should we become Japanese when we present? To be successful here we need two presentations. We need the global best practice slide deck, the one which gets to the key points quickly and clearly. The information on screen must be able to be grasped in two seconds. If it takes longer than that, the slide is too complex and needs to be simplified further. When we deliver it, we use our eye contact to engage the audience, our voice modulation to provide variety to keep the audience with us and use our gestures to highlight key concepts, phrases and words.

Bring Supporting Multi Volume Compendiums

We should also bring a massively thick compendium of supporting information, so high you couldn't jump over it, to go with your presentation which was focused on the highlights. After the meeting or after they have received your written proposal, there will be staff designated to comb through this data to find all the problems associated with working with you and doing business with your company.

Japan has a highly risk averse culture, especially in business. The people you are dealing with are not going to get massive bonuses and rewards for risk taking. In Japan, the ratio of CEO pay, vis-à-vis the median employee's pay, is 58 times greater, compared to 670 times in the USA. The upside isn't big for risk taking here, but the downside for making a mistake is massive. The people you are dealing with or the people in the presentation room, will not be making any decisions, until the forensic due diligence has been completed. For that purpose, they have a data devouring demonic need for information. Always be fully professional in your delivery, but carry a very big bag full of information and hand that over. Trust me, no one will complain about the weight.

Once you understand the conversation going on in the mind of your Japanese customer you can meet them there and things will become much easier. Don't try to be Japanese. Be yourself, but be smart, professional, well organised and come packing heavy with data – lots and lots of data.

Storytelling in business is an open field. In most facets of commerce, the field is crowded, established foes are entrenched behind high protective walls and as far as you can see it is all red ocean. Presenting however is all blue ocean because most business leaders hardly even get their toes wet. They dismiss being able to present in a professional manner as fluff, smoke and mirrors, all show and no substance, inconsequential. Their approach to speaking in public is that the audience are only there for the data, statistics, the latest information and the delivery is irrelevant. If possible, they prefer to avoid the whole affair because it is painful for them. Being persuasive however has never gone out of style in business and that is a universal and timeless truth.

Being persuasive has many aspects, such as understanding who is going to be in the audience and determining what is the purpose of your talk. Are you there to inform, inspire, convince or entertain? Research teams and underlings are good at digging out different data points and the temptation is to throw these logs on the fire to heat up the audience. Nothing wrong with that except all of this data struggles to remain in the memory and it makes the whole talk crusty and dry, like week old bread left outside.

When we can wrap the information in a story we start to really motor with our audience. This delivery technique is tremendously impactful because it makes the information easy to remember and makes the message clear and attractive. Many business leaders however are never exposed to how to tell a story, so they have little idea where to start. I cannot tell a joke to save my life, but I can tell a story because I know structures, which make this process easy for me.

There are a number of steps.

1. We are fed a constant diet of professional storytelling in the media and there are always a number of key characters involved. Who will these characters be in our story? They could be the founder, members of the senior leadership team, researchers, scientists, clients, etc. If the main characters are well known to the audience then even better. Our object is to have those listening picture the face of that person in their mind. If I make Elon Musk the main character, then I am guessing that everyone can see his face in their minds eye. Maybe the company CEO or CFO is also so recognisable that the entire firm can see their face when they hear the name.

1. What is going on in the background of this story? Why are the key points we are going to cover relevant? What is the driving the circumstances of this story's punchline? When we describe the context we need some guideposts. When was it? Is this last month or two years ago? What was the season? Was it a February snowy day or a brutal Tokyo summer August day? Where was it? Are we in a boardroom in the HQ, a Hotel restaurant, a convention, a research lab? Which of the main characters were there at that moment? Remember our task is to transport our listeners to that key point in the story, to get them seeing the same scene we are describing in their mind. That requires that we paint the location and people with a series of word pictures.

1. Conflict/Opportunity. Every drama we see on television or at the movies and every novel we read, has this construct. The good guys and the bad guys are both there to create the tension in the drama. In our business story there will be protagonists. That may be the market, the currency, the competition, the regulator, the bank, the suppliers, the client, the government. Think about the recent supply chain issues. There are plenty of protagonists involved to explain why this phenomenon is impacting businesses.

It could be Covid or the war in Ukraine. It might be a technological breakthrough that destroys established players as Nokia found with the launch of the iPhone. We need to place the conflict inside the context we have described and make it clear how high the stakes are here, because that degree of tension is gripping. There has been no shortage of drama for my industry, the training industry, since Covid started. Probably none of us will have any trouble finding conflicts or opportunities to describe to the audience and we intertwine the main characters to make it real for the listeners.

1. This may be positive or negative, but there will be an outcome in the story. Even if the conclusion is that this is where we are at this point and here is what we expect to be coming down the pike, should there be no ultimate resolution at this juncture. We need to put a ribbon on the story however and tie it off, so it not just left hanging. The audience needs a finale of some sort or they are left feeling unfulfilled.

1. After having explained the context, the main protagonists, the drama of the conflict or opportunity and how it ended, we now proffer some insights. There is no doubt we love to hear the lessons from the train wreck more than the swan story about silkily gliding across the surface of the business context. If my speech is titled "How I made $100 million", for most people, it will not be as attractive as the title "How I lost $100 million". We all love a juicy business meltdown and all the drama which went toward creating that disaster. We do this so we can learn what not to do ourselves.

Everyone of us has amazing business stories inside us already. If we don't have enough, relax, the universe will just keep minting them going forward. If you don't have enough of your own, just start reading the business news and there you have a cornucopia of content to work with.