The belated comment….
The seminar, which took place on July 5th, was very exciting in the end but I felt anxious at the beginning in two ways.

* The speaker was a middle-aged Japanese businessperson
I always lament about the low-level communication skill those people possess, and their willingness to avoid decision in any occation. They use the word “do” as the glorified version of “hope” and use the word “think” as the glorified version of “heard”.
Thus, when they say “I will do xxx” they mean “I would like to xxx” – they don’t want to do anything but hope for something to happen, and when they say “I think xxx” they mean “I heard xxx” – they don’t think of anything but pulling out superficial knowledge gained from weekly magazines.
I especially get irritated because they are sometimes no different than who I actually am….
Anyway nobody would go to the seminar to listen to the re-edition of Asahi newspaper.

* The speaker planned to do this in English
Yes indeed Suga san studied at Harvard and got his MBA, but it doesn’t guarantee he can command a reasonable level of English. Business school doesn’t replace Language school, that’s what we have learned through the MBA hype.

Both concerns couldn’t have been more wrong. The summary also tells it clearly.

Suga san was a full-fledged, self-made businessperson whose every word was backed up with years of experience. He spoke one of the best English I have heard from Japanese businessperson. It’s not about the grammer or pronounciation, although those were excellent as well, it’s about his attitude. His message always contained who was in charge of what, and there was no room to whine or muddle.

Even more amazing was that he is so humble despite of his high-profiled career. For typical Japanese salary-men, the incentive of getting promoted is not the stock option or higher salary, but is that they can bully the junior staff and suppliers. Thus so many arrogant people…

To be continued….