welcome to disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me today. I want to tell you the story of one of the most embarrassing and publicly humiliating events of my life and something very important to talk me about doing business in Japan Before we get to that, However, I received a lot of feedback from the last episode on the Japanese trap of the glorious failure,

including a number

of Japanese listeners who said they really liked Taniguchi Bukos explanation of corporate Japan's negative point system. But by far the most popular request was for pictures and mawr. Life lessons from Mark the Dog.

Well, okay, I'm going to do that, But please understand

that that this is not a very deep well, there's Onley so much that marked, The dog can teach us about how we should live our lives because,

after all, and then Mark the dog is well, he's a dog, so I'll put a couple

of pictures of Mark the dog on the website. And yes, he is very cute and I'll let

you know that there is, in fact,

one more thing that marked the dog has taught me during the ongoing locked down. You know how dogs get really excited every time they hear a little noise outside or see something move past the window or how they become merely hysterical. Whenever someone rings the doorbell, our

comes to the door. Well, I get that now. I totally

understand where dogs air coming from. On this

the other week, two pigeons landed on my window sill and and I got way more

excited about that than I probably should have.

So, hey, to all the world's dogs, we're cool. No judgment here. Okay? Okay. Back

to our main story about my path to success via public humiliation. One of the things people always say when they find out I've been living in Japan for almost 30 years is

Wow. How good is your Japanese? You must be fluent. And I I never really know how to answer that. I'm definitely not fluent. I mean, I'm not

trying to be overly humble here. My Japanese is good. I I manage staff in Japanese. I do sales and Japanese. I do presentations and Japanese. So So it's good, but fluent no. Often when I try to explain a complex or abstract thought. I managed to get lost before I find my way to the verb. I can't get into a heated argument in Japanese,

and I

usually don't understand most of the jokes like my Wife Loves Rock Ago, which is a popular Japanese form of comedy storytelling. They're these long, shaggy dog stories

that people find absolutely hysterical, and and I can understand 100% of this story. But I can't

for the life of me see how any of it is funny. And of course, there is Kagel, the mind bogglingly complex protocol of honorific and humble forms whose use depends on a complex, three dimensional matrix of formality in group out group status and the role you're playing in that particular situation. Frankly, once I get past basic greetings and a few set phrases, I tend to screw it up pretty badly. But as

I mentioned, Keiko is hard.

Even native Japanese speakers mess it up Sometimes, I mean, not

as badly as I do, obviously, but but still it's hard, and I usually get something wrong. But the funny thing is, that seems to be okay. In Japan, you get a lot of points for just trying. People really

appreciate a genuine effort to get it right. Even when you get things very wrong. Sincere intention counts for a lot. But anyway, why so much information about my

Japanese ability? Well, you need

to understand that for the rest of our story to make sense. And so this brings us to one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. And I am not exaggerating when I say that I literally had nightmares about this event for months afterwards. So I'm sharing this, hoping you can learn from my mistakes because I would not wish this experience on anyone. Okay, So what happened? This was about seven years ago when I was the Japan CEO for an American software start up, and I had the chance to give a presentation at a start up an investment conference. No problem. I I do presentations and Japanese all the time. And besides, I had over a month for me and my staff to put the speech together and for me to practice and polish any rough edges. I was psyched. I mean, this was actually an amazing opportunity. I was being given 20 minutes to address an incredibly important audience of Japan's leading investors. Start ups and the press.

There would be about 1000 people in attendance, So, yeah, I was feeling a little pressure, but but in a good way, it was a kind of motivating pressure. So I wrote and

refined and practiced my speech. The day came, I waited my turn backstage. The emcee introduced me. I walked confidently onto the stage with a title slide with our company logo displayed on a huge screen behind me. I began my speech

in Japanese, and then things began to go horribly, horribly wrong. The actually, it's

hard to say exactly where everything started to go bad. I've replayed these events in my mind far more times than is healthy, and I don't think there was any one thing that caused it. But things began to unravel. It turned out that my 20 minute presentation needed to be 30 minutes, so I would have to improvise to stretch my speech 50% longer to fill the time. A few little jokes I made were met with silence, so the audience understood the jokes. They just didn't think they were funny at all that slide four. I realized that my staff had sent the wrong presentation deck. It was one of the older versions. The slide. You're out of order. I was trying to figure out exactly which version of the deck this waas and remember which slides have been added and removed since then. Each slide transition brought a new confused panic as

I tried to remember what I used to say on this slide and trying to improvise toe ADM or content and explanation so I could fill the 30 minutes all while in the back of my mind I was desperately trying to remember or even guess what slide might be coming next. And even when I guess right, I just couldn't remember what I was supposed to be saying. I did not do well. I ended my presentation at the 27 minute marked and thank the audience. There was polite but quiet applause. I walked off stage

with as much confidence as I could fake and return to my seat. The emcee was a pro. He brought the energy of the room back up on brought on the next guest. I just wanted to die. I wanted to simply disappear from the earth and be for gotten

Mostly. I just really wanted to go home, but I couldn't even do that. I was up in front in the speaker's row. There was no way

for me to leave without the entire audience seeing me do it. No, I had to sit there for another hour, but then the event would be over. I would still have toe face the walk of shame through the reception and networking

area, but then I could get my coat and go home. But when that time finally came, something

very strange happened on the way an older and particularly well dressed executive tapped me on the arm and said in Japanese, Wow, that was really amazing. I don't think I would ever have the guts to try a speech like that in English

before I could finish thanking him to 56 more people came

over and wanted to chat, everyone congratulating me on the courage I showed and everyone wanting to know more about me and my company and what we did with the pressure off. I was speaking Japanese normally again, I had a crowd of people around me until the networking event ended and the doors closed. I walked out with a stack of business cards and six actual appointments with prospective customers from

a purely numerical, data driven point of view. It was one of the most successful presentations I've ever given. It turns out that in Japan,

a terrible speech in Japanese is actually much more appreciated than a polished one in English.

But it was awful. In fact, I haven't been counting, but but I think I've had to do six, maybe seven retakes just to record this story for you. So when people ask me how

good their Japanese needs to be in order to be effective

in business, I I just don't have an answer for them because that's not the point. It's making the effort that matters, use whatever you have and make the best of it. People are wonderfully appreciative of sincere efforts, no matter how badly you screw them up. And you know that's probably true about a lot of things in life. Do the

best you can with what you have. Nothing is more worthy of respect. This has been kind of a hard one,

but if you want to talk more about making the best of what you have dropped by disrupting japan dot com slash show 1 64 And and let's talk about it. Please also check us out on Linked In or Facebook and And if you like the show, please tell people about it. But most of all, thanks for listening and thank you for letting

people interested in Japanese startups and innovation know about the show. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening to disrupting Japan.