115 Surprisingly, Smart People Are Often Clueless At Presenting

<p>Japan is an interesting place.  So many things here are ultra modern, high tech, totally nuanced and sophisticated.  You take it for granted that your refrigerator door opens from either side and is deathly quiet, that your vacuum cleaner is very light weight and efficient, that your toilet has more control options than most aircraft.  So when you hit something out of character you really notice the difference.  Presenting skills is the outlier.</p> <p> </p> <p>We were brought in to consult for and train a very large company’s CEO for a key speech he will be making.  We looked at the last year’s speech by the previous CEO.  All attempts to humanise the speech had been deleted by that President and it was boiled down to boiled cabbage.  An amorphous lump with no life, passion, energy or interest.  The explanation was that the audience was made of Presidents of related companies and boiled cabbage was all they could take. Anything else might be considered too radical.  In the banking world, it is acceptable to fail, as long as you fail conventionally.  Presenting in Japan would seem to be the same case.</p> <p> </p> <p>When it comes to communication and persuasion when presenting, this is a big blocker to progress in Japan,.  The level is so low here, that the audience has been trained to expect boiled cabbage and if they don’t get it, they are unhappy.  This sucks even smart people into the vortex of underperformance and even stupidity in some cases.</p> <p> </p> <p>Watching a very, very innovative, well educated scientist and entrepreneur destroy his presentation really brought home to me the professional gap around presenting in Japan.  He is obviously very smart, has become a legend in Japan for innovation and is rightly lauded for the pioneering work he is doing. </p> <p> </p> <p>His content was very, very good but the delivery was very, very bad.  The full message was lost because of the way he presented it.  He could have been so much more effective by doing one ridiculously simple thing.  Presenters in J