The Leadership Japan Series

We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios.  The premise is always the same.  The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone.  What about for leaders when coaching their team members?  Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help

The chain of command is a well established military leadership given.  I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else.  In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers.  This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback again

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape.  We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk.  We have two types of people working for us.  There are those who receive

I met the owner of a successful business recently.  He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction.  So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange.  It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was exp

The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”.  I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here.  I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t

Years ago I inverted the pyramid and promoted the best salespeople to become the branch leaders.  The existing branch leaders were shuffled around to new branches and they provided the grey hair and the credibility needed by the older rich clientele, but didn’t have responsibility for driving revenues anymore.  They we