Presenting online is difficult.  Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter.  We teach presentation skills and one of the big breakthroughs for our class participants is the ability to get engagement with their audience.  In the online world of presenting this is almost impossible.  You become this tiny talking head, trapped in a tiny box on screen, every time you are using slides.  If there are no slides it gets better.  It also gets better if you stop the sharing function as you get a little more screen real estate. The trouble is this feature is clunky every time you want to go back to using the slides again and the interchanges are not very elegant. If you can have the speaker view only function working, then you get a lot of screen ratio focused on the speaker and that is good.  Usually though, we are using slides and so it is back to the tiny box for all of us on-screen.

The real dilemma with hybrid is where some members of the audience are sitting there right in front of you and the rest are scattered to the four winds, coming in via the hosting platform, be that Zoom or Teams or Webex or whatever.  There are issues with the camera angles, the camera zoom-in function and especially with the audio quality.  If the camera is mounted at the back of the room, then the audience on-line gets a wide shot of those in the room, as well as the speaker up at the front of the room. In this case, we are very remote from the people watching from home. This insignificance factor is intensified by the fact we are highly diminished on screen, stuck in that tiny little box and being presented at a distance to our audience.  Our facial expression power is greatly reduced and even our gestures are not having much impact, because they seem so small when on screen. 

I was giving a talk recently using the hybrid system and I realised this particular set up was for people who don't know how to present and actually favoured those who like to lecture.  By that I mean the speaker is there to convey information and isn’t thinking how to engage the audience.  The camera was mounted on a screen to my right, up high.  There was a distance between that camera and my face and if I moved toward my audience in the room, I found I was tracking away from the camera set up for those at home.  Don’t forget, for those viewing from home, I was doing all this while trapped in that tiny box on screen, because I was using slides.   

The set up meant I couldn’t move much from the spot and that spot was set behind a podium.  Now I don’t recommend moving around too much when speaking because it can be distracting from the message. However, being able to use your full body language is a powerful tool we don’t want to negate if we can avoid it and getting out from behind the podium is preferred.  In this case that wasn’t possible, so the audience in the room wasn’t getting full access to me as the speaker.

The easy out is to ignore the needs of the audience coming in online and just present to those in the room. For those at home the video presentation is like that for a third party. They are there watching remotely and there is zero connection and engagement with the person on screen.  If we go the other way, then we just engage those at home and don’t worry about those in the room.  That isn’t a very natural or an easy thing for a speaker to do, when all of these faces are sitting there and staring up at you in the room.

We have to accept that so far, we cannot easily get this to work perfectly when using two competing mediums.  Having said that, we can try and improve on it being a disaster by a couple of tweaks.  If the camera is close to us, then regularly switching our attention from those in the room, to those at home is possible.  We just look straight into the camera and we can speak directly to this segment of the audience.  We can make our point to this audience and then switch back to those in the room and make our next point.  The key is to look at the camera and not the screen.  We just treat the on-line camera as another member of the in-room audience.

Eye height is ideal for the camera mounting, so adjust it if you can, to get that perspective.  Make sure the audio quality is well served by having a good microphone set up, so that people online can hear you.  If the in-room audience is under 30 people, then you can get away with not needing a separate microphone for them. 

The better solution requires some preparation.  Have a monitor at the back so the speaker can see the remote audience and also themselves, with everyone equally trapped in their little boxes on-line.  The slide deck is also being shown through Zoom etc., so that the remote audience can see what is going on, while the live audience has a screen in the room they can see. Have the speaker fitted with a pin mic, so that they can move and not be trapped behind a podium or a desk. 

Have three video cameras set up.  One zoomed in on the speaker for a tight shot and one for a wider, more full body shot.  Have another set up at the front of the room to capture the shot of the audience. This requires a connection to a control box, where the camera angles can be switched easily by a controller.  The speaker now only has to engage the live audience. The camera angles are set up from the in-room audience perspective so that those at home get the same sense of the presentation as those present.  They are getting the video of the speech live and all the speaker has to do is engage by looking straight at the cameras while giving the speech, to help the remote audience feel included.  We spend six seconds each time looking at our live audience members and we just do the same with the two cameras facing us, as if they were also audience members.

The setup I had for my recent talk was not satisfactory and I felt both the remote and in-person audiences had been cheated.  I also felt my personal brand had been tarnished by this less than satisfactory experience.  When we are invited to speak we have little control over how the hosts arrange the venue and the equipment.  One of my take aways for next time was to engage the hosts more in depth on how they are going to handle this hybrid medium presentation.  If they are not going to do it in a way which builds, or at least maintains, my professional brand, then I would decline the offer to speak.  I might offer to give two talks - one for those in the room and do a separate one for those at home.  That isn’t always possible, but as the speaker, tasting the bitter ash residue of a failed, half-baked presentation isn’t great either.

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success.  Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan’s population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049.  At the same time Japanese companies are looking outside to grow their businesses.  This is good for Japan, except that when you become international, you need to deal in English.  Where are these English speakers going to come from?

Prior to the Lehman Shock there were over 80,000 Japanese students travelling abroad to study.  After the Lehman shock this number dropped down to 50,000 a year and has crawled back up to around 60,000. Lately, seventy per cent of those studying abroad only stayed for one month, which makes you wonder what they picked up in that short period.

Another worrying thing is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad to study.  Over 60% of High School students said they would rather stay in Japan and over 50% of young people in general, said the same thing.  So where are the needed English speakers going to come from?

The answer is from inside our companies.  Larger companies will send their Japanese staff abroad to work and in the process they improve their international understanding and their language skills.  In the past, these returnees have been an alien force for companies, because they come back with a different mindset and the companies haven’t been flexible enough about integrating them into the mother ship.  This is getting better and where it hasn’t, these valuable employees jump ship to a better environment, that is to say our firms, where their talents, particularly language ability, can be fully utilised.

The general acceptance of mid-career hires has improved a lot in Japan too and we can all thank the 1999 collapse of Yamaichi securities for that. A lot of loyal, lifetime employees were thrown out on the street and were picked up by other companies, reducing the stigma attached to mid-career hires.  The Lehman Shock in 2008, the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and the pandemic since 2020 have all continued this trend of people losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Mid-career hiring has continued to be more accepted as a function of the modern world and this gives all of us better access to English speakers moving companies.

English language lessons are often prevalent inside organisations, as they work to help their staff do better in communicating with the outside world and with staff in Japan from overseas.  The problem for some of them though is no amount of English language lessons will convince them to speak up in meetings or to volunteer to present in English.  This is where they need additional help. 

When forced to present in English, the reflex action is to put all the text up on the screen, so that they can read it to their audience.  If that isn’t possible, then they print it all out and read it, word for word, while diligently looking down at the script, ignoring the audience altogether. “Painful” is the main word to describe this experience for those on the receiving end.  Why are they destroying their presentations in this way? 

The simple answer is perfectionism, driven by fear.  This is a country of no defects, no mistakes and no errors.  Making a mistake while speaking in English therefore is not possible, the loss of face unimaginable, so all manner of artifices have to be employed to avoid this inadequacy.  For the foreigners listening to mistakes made in English by Japanese speakers, this is usually nothing to worry about.  We are coming from multi-cultural societies and are used to non-native speakers making pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes.  We just mentally rearrange what they said into the correct alignment and answer their questions or make our contribution to whatever they said, without missing a beat.  Basically, we are not demanding linguistic purity or perfection – this need is all in the heads of the Japanese when speaking English. 

We must help them by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to free them from the chains of grammar, to overlook the butchering of certain words when spoken out loud.  We need to encourage them to concentrate on communication and not language. 

What I mean by that is putting their passion behind what they say.  To speak a little louder than normal, in order to sound more confident, which helps with the credibility of what is being said. To employ pauses to moderate their speaking speed, in case they get nervous and start prattling along.  To use the slide as a prompt and speak to the point with the English they have, rather than losing their audience by reading off the screen or script.  To try and engage their audience by making eye contact for at least six seconds and to try and make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible during the course of their talk.  In this way they can establish the feeling of a personal connection between speaker and listener which is completely independent of language capability.  To employ gestures to strengthen the point they are making and not to feel self-conscious about doing so.

We have limited access to those Japanese who have lived abroad and so have to make the most of those we have managed to attract into our companies.  Whatever level of English they have has to be worked on beyond English language classes, to enable them to present in a professional manner.  If this support is there, then they will become more comfortable dealing with foreign colleagues and speaking in English.  They will become fully functioning members of the team and able to work across borders and language barriers.

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job.  Suddenly we are left with nothing.  If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites.  They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don’t like the cut of our jib.  If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person. 

Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years.  The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed.  The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different.  Basically, we have to start again.  We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company.  Some are working in the office and some are still at home.  Getting hold of people puts us in quandary. 

That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory.  In Japan, if you don’t know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with.  “We will take a message and let them know” in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call.  The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won’t tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy.

I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful.  Frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.  I never did meet the new President 

What can we do?  If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year.  It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn’t assume they will be staying put.  Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them. 

If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over.  Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor.  There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work.  When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust.  What personality style are they?  Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person?  What communication stye do they prefer?  We need to rejig everything. 

If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult.  Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens.  How will we know when they have recruited the new person?  This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm.  We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person. 

Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person.  We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person.  Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us.

Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation.  This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a merger and the conquering acquirer ditched my guy, to put in their own guy.  In another case, I happened to see a LinkedIn post where a mutual friend was congratulating my champion on his new venture.  New venture?  What new venture?  I discovered he had quit the company and was now doing his own thing.  That happened very fast.  A third President, who had been very, very effective in his role and a great client, was suddenly gone.  I still don’t know why, but my champion has been pushed out. We need to keep a close eye on our champions!

All of this presupposes we are well organised.  We need to keep checking on the internal transfer plans for our champion and also to take action immediately we know they are leaving to be able to track the arrival of their replacement and find out the new name.  We need to keep up a regular contact with our President champion, because there are no guarantees of corporate loyalty or longevity anymore. None of this guarantees anything, but it is a lot better than trying to batter down the iron wall keeping us out.  Sales is hard anywhere but Japan just adds that patina of difficulty which makes everything much harder here.  Yes, it should be better, it should be different but it isn't. We have to adapt and be both agile and nimble.

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck.  The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message.  If you ever doubt this, take a look at most Japanese business presentations.  The slide will usually be amazingly overcrowded and dense to a degree you cannot comprehend in a traditional culture, which has embraced zen simplicity at its highest levels.  Four or five slides worth of content will be crammed on to one slide and the messages feel like they snapping at each other for our attention, like small dogs nipping at your heels. 

Occasionally, here in Japan, you do see a professional job on the visual side of the presentation.  In my experience, this is usually the case of a foreigner giving their presentation.  The counterpoint from some Japanese to this exemplary effort is to tell me that okay for foreigners but “we Japanese have own way” of doing presentations.  This nationalistic anachronism is basically crap and what I see as a pathetic exercise in justifying the unjustifiable. 

“Whoa Greg! Mate, you are going a bit hard there on the Japanese aren’t you?”.  Trust me after living here for 38 years and having seen hundreds of Japanese presentations in business, I feel my scepticism is warranted.  Message clarity is message clarity. No amount of nationalistic posturing and excuse making will overcome the basic fact that you cannot have four different fonts and five colours on a massively overcrowded screen and expect that your principal message will be getting through. You might think I am kidding about multi-font and multi-colour slides, but I am merely capturing what we see here from some Japanese business presenters.

Okay, Japanese presenters are not the only ones who do crazy stuff on screen and I have certainly coached Western executives to change the way they present, to make it more clear and powerful. The point is what we put up on screen should be clear and easy to digest. I believe if the audience cannot get the key message on screen in two seconds, then the content is too complex and needs to be simplified.  This has always been my motto. Today, thanks to social media, the attention span of people has radically shortened and the time on screen equation has gotten even tighter, than say ten years ago.  For all of us, the pressure is really on to improve our communication ability, regardless of nationality

Another trap with visuals is making them too good.  That sounds counter-intuitive I know and there are plenty of authors doing well by teaching us how to pimp our slides.  What I mean is we can suffer the opposite problem of the dismal slide effort and have something that is so attractive, it cuts us out of the limelight.  Never forget, our face rather than the screen is the most valuable real estate during a presentation.

Using our facial expression is one of the most effective tools we have.  Think back to stage plays you have seen where the character is using their face to communicate an emotion or a thought on a bare stage with a simple set.  Their face can transmit so many ideas, emotions and thoughts and do it in nano seconds.  A quizzical look, scowl, grin, sneer, smile, puzzlement, triumph, loss are all facial expressions at our disposal as speakers, to be matched with our words and then add on our gestures to create a powerhouse of communication.

Presenting gets a bit harder when the venue is quite big and there are two enormous screens up high behind us, competing with us.  The sheer size of the images dwarfs us on stage and we shrink in importance.  If we are ever in that situation, then we have to really work hard to counter the competition we are getting from the visuals. We need the audience to stay with us.  We don't want them ignoring us because they are captivated by visuals which are overpowering the speaker.

 In these situations, we have to amp up our voice and gestures to keep the audience with us.  By using pauses, we can tap into pattern interrupt psychology, to force the listeners to refocus on us and what we are saying.  When the visuals are super attractive, we can easily become some annoying white noise going on in the background, while the audience is fascinated by the visual images being presented.  When we stop speaking, the listeners get their fill of the visual image and are then looking for the next round of stimulation. That stimulation has to be focused on what we are saying. 

We should definitely use this if we are playing video during the presentation.  Most video is off the mark anyway, being produced by the PR department to fit across a general need, rather than the specific needs of the topic we are speaking on.  Sometimes the visuals can be very attractive in the video however and the audience can get engrossed by the action and images.  The danger is we are the next item and we are boring, nowhere near as attractive as the models in the video and a bit dull visually compared to what has just been presented.

This is why as the speaker we should inject a longish pause after the video, rather than just carrying straight on.  By doing this we create some space and distance between what they saw on screen and they have some time to adjust to us back in the room.  They are also anticipating what we will say next, because we haven’t started speaking immediately and there is a slightly disconcerting pause in place.  Fifteen seconds is a long pause and it will be a very valuable fifteen seconds to get the audience to forget what they just saw and get them back concentrating on us.

“Never let the visuals dominate your presentation” should be the basic rule.  They are a slave to our will and a tool at our disposal and that is all they are.  Let’s keep the power equation in our favour and always remain the centrepiece of the presentation.  Our face, gestures and voice are more than up to the task, if we know what we are doing.

 The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections.  We don’t need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be a presenter, but we do need to borrow from their catalogue and start building up stories.  I was listening to an interview with a rakugo professional. They make their living telling stories.  They do this while sitting stationary on a big cushion dressed in kimono, employ only a fan as a prop and use their facial expressions, eye power, voice modulation, body language and delivery timing to captivate their audience.  We have many fewer restrictions in what we are doing when presenting, but there is much to learn here.

They start by copying the stories of their master and then they bring their own flavour to the story once they have mastered it.  We can do the same.  When we read a biography of a famous person, we will find there are many interesting turning points, eureka moments and key incidents in their story, which we can use in our presentations as examples.  The big difference is we have probably read these before, but without the mindset to capture them, note them down where they can be found and then to employ them. 

Once we decide that we are going to employ more stories to make our points, we start to read and search with a different purpose.  Generally, there are only a few topics on which we will give a public speech and so there is a defined world in which we can search for stories.  If we think we have to read everything available and search for stories across a broad front, we will give up, because the task is overwhelming.  We select the areas we will cover and then we think about where can we find stories on these topics. 

Another way is to think about people who will resonate with the audience.  If you think Steve Jobs is a likely example who people will pay attention to, then we search out what he had to say or what people have said about him and try and find relevant stories and examples we can use. There is no shortage of famous people we can draw upon, we just have to make simple list and then start.

There are plenty of speeches available on TED talks and on YouTube or on podcasts where we can locate content we can use.  We can search from the content point of view or from the individual whom we think will have something worthwhile to say.  There are thousands of blogs, articles and books on the subject we have chosen.  The key is to absorb them with a viewpoint that we are looking for content we can use, rather than just absorbing the content for its own sake.  We can do both of course and we should be doing both.

In our communities, there are bound to be people giving talks.  We should attend these and see if they have any interesting examples or stories we can use.  There is no shame in attributing the stories to the person you heard it from – no one marks you down for doing that because all they care about is do they get value from the story.  Ripping off other people’s stories and then manufacturing them as if they are your own cases is a very, very bad idea.  Plagiarism of any variety shouts that you are an intellectual lightweight and pathetic thief.  This is not a reputation building plus, so don’t steal. 

Remember, our reputation in the business world is all we have really.  Lose that and life in business gets very hard, as no one will trust you or want to work with you.  If you are so duplicitous as to steal someone’s story material, then why would we see you as a reliable business partner?  Well we won’t and you don’t have to do this anyway because there are tons of stories available.  We will have our own home grown experiences and there will be plenty of these to draw on.  What we usually lack is the ability to capture what happened and use it.  Often things happen and we just keep moving forward and don’t capture the detail so that we can use it later.  Or if we do capture it, we can never find where we put it.

This requires a good record keeping system, with a robust filing and recall mechanism and also the discipline to look for good stories to capture in the first place.  It means we have to be well organised.  We don’t exactly know which story we will need or just when, but if we can locate what we need, when we need it, then we are good to go. To get to that stage isn’t that easy, but today there are digital records we can access from anywhere.  I use Evernote on my phone to capture items I think will be useful for later.  I can re-type it or photograph it, so the process becomes fast. I can download this content and move it around to file it, categorise it and find it later.  I am sure there are many other apps for this purpose and that is the beauty of this age - we have few excuses for not being able to capture useful information.

How many stories do we need?  Not that many because we don't get that many chances to give a public talk.  As I mentioned the speech topics will probably be limited.  When you combine few speaking opportunities with a limited range of topics, then the number of stories required becomes relatively small in number.  If you said I need ten stories, that would be relatively easy to assemble over the period of a year.  If you said one hundred, then that thought will probably have you zooming straight to the couch to lie down for a while and recuperate.  Start small and capture them one on one and before you know it, you will be surprised with how many useful pieces you have assembled.