294: How Good Are Your Supporting Documents To Drive The Sale

<p><span style= "font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;"> Japan just devours data, statistics and information.  When you visit some scenic spot, there will be an amazing level of data available about that venue.  The announcement on the subway train when you arrive at your stop will warn you that there is a specific gap in so many centimeters between the platform and the train, so be careful.  I first discovered this data addiction when I was here as a student, some forty years ago.  I attended a scholarly conference on Sino-Japanese Relations, as that was my area of specialty, trying to combine my Chinese and Japanese skills to access original source documents for my research.  A Japanese Professor was making a point in his lecture about the differences between China and Japan and he used a story about the introduction of Zen into Japan.  Zen originated in India and came to Japan via China, so various Japanese Zen monks would make the perilous journey to China, to study there. </span></p> <p> </p> <p>There was a Zen story involving a well and a bucket to make some esoteric point about the condition of humanity.  In the Chinese version, the concentration was on the broader allegorical point.  The Japanese version had that too, but went into supreme, finite detail about the dimension of the well, its construction, how the rope and bucket were made, etc. </p> <p> </p> <p>This love of detail and data still permeates in business today as well.  Because there is that distinct fear of making a mistake, one of the clear antidotes in Japan, is to amass masses of data, so that you can analyse everything before you take any decisions.  We have the same thing in the West and we characterise it as “paralysis by analysis”.  When we turn up to sell our widget, we had better come packing data, lots of data.  This is a slippery slope though.</p> <p> </p> <p>The temptation is to wade straight into the detail, the facts, the stats, t