Episode 63:  THE Leadership Japan Series - How to be a Leader Who Can Super Motivate Staff
Today we are going to listen to a presentation given to McGill University MBA class here in Tokyo on how to be a leader who can super motivate staff.
Staff Intro:  Greg is a big supporter of this program.  He’s been coming here to talk since about 2007, years and years ago.  He actually gave the graduation speech in 2009.  We really appreciate Greg coming back to speak with us.  Today’s format is similar to before.  We’ll have a presentation by Greg and then questions and answers, and then we’ll spend a little bit of time to give you a chance to network and exchange meishi if you like. 
Greg:  What I am going to talk about today is leadership and how to motivate people. One of the issues in successful business is it is very hard to be successful if you can’t take the people with you, unless you want to be doing everything yourself.  Leading people is not such a straightforward thing.  What are some of the issues that you have found so far in your businesses with people?  What is difficult about people?  Give me some feedback.
Participant:  The people. (Laughter)
Greg:  What’s another difficulty you found dealing with people?
Participant:  Understanding their motivations.
Greg:  Understanding their motivations, yes.  What else?
Participant:  Big egos.
Greg:  Big egos.  Trying to understand how to deal with people who are highly driven but are hard to handle. Yes.
Participant:  People who compare themselves to other people and what other people are getting.
Greg:  Yes, worried about their package, or their bonus or their conditions at work and whinging about it to you probably.  What else do we have?  What else do you see?
Participant:  Emotions.
Greg: Emotions, yes.  People are not inanimate objects.  They are driven by emotion.  We justify with logic, but actually it is a lot of emotional things going on for us.  In the time we have left today, I am going to give you as much as I can to help you in becoming much more successful with people.  At the end I’ll try to give you an opportunity to find where to get more help if you want it.  Also, please remind me at the end too if you would like to get the video of this and my slides.  I am more than happy to share them.  At the end give your meishi to me and I will send it to you.
We start with Dale Carnegie, 24 years old.  About the same age as some of the people in this room maybe.  A young man starts a company.  He starts a brand new business.  A business in the self-help industry, which didn’t exist when he started his business.  He created an industry.  And maybe, like you, he’s facing many fears.  How am I going to run this business?  Where am I going with this?  He was an overnight success.  It just took 24 years to get there.  Over those 24 years as he is conducting his classes, helping people get better with other people, it was like a living laboratory for him.  He’s getting ideas and he’s getting examples and he’s getting problems and he’s making note of these.  He’s working out solutions and he’s recording these solutions.  He’s polishing and he’s polishing and he’s polishing.  Finally in 1936 he gets Simon and Shuster, a massive book brand in the publishing world, to publish an unknown, unheard of author who runs a training company.  In today’s parlance we’d say, “success, went viral with this book”.  It didn’t only go viral, it went viral globally.  Here’s a guy who went from being a well-known person in the training business to being a global guru.  In Japan his books in translation have sold more than 9 million copies.  You are in a living laboratory right now.  Wherever you are working and whatever you are doing, you see stuff going well and stuff going not so well.  Grab it.  This could be your book.  This could be your viral hit.  And it may not be on Simon and Shuster, it may be on Kindle, it may be an eBook, but you have got the living laboratory right where you are to ta