13 books to learn basic business skills in Japanese (April 2017 - Ver.1)

Let me share information about my favorite books to learn basic skills of business and marketing. I often lend my books to tell something to my co-workers because good books are simply more persuading than I am. This is not only because books sound very objective as a third party's point of views, but also because books are easy to understand thanks to its systematicness and rich storytelling.

Favorite Books for Documentation

"Basic Rules of Informative Design" by Yuma Takahashi and Natsu Katayama

This is a must-read book especially for those who are not confident in their design sense but would like to prepare good looking documents. This book tells not a method for great creatives, but a method to take advantages of fonts, colors, margins, alignments and so on to make your documents nice.

"Documentation Method for Inner Presentation" by Kamari Maeda

This book is more like a book for those who want to learn small techniques to construct simple stories by Powerpoint. You will understand why your documents should contain less words. The less words you write, the simpler your story becomes, and the more logical your presentation becomes.

"The Copywriting" by Masanori Kanda

This book is a Japanese translation of "Tested Advertising Methods" by John Caples. This book tells all the essential knowledges about how you should choose your words on sales documents from the scientific point of view. This book is, I think, a must-read for all the business persons, but on the other hand, it makes you bored of the flood of cheap copywriting on online ads.

Favorite Books for Career Strategy

"Lanchester's No.1 Laws" by Hitoshi Sakaue

This book says easily about Lanchester's Laws, which is a famous strategy for the weak to win, and for the strong to win. This book focuses on small or medium-sized enterprises, and argues that their resources should concentrate on limited targets. Although the book says mainly about enterprises, the laws also apply greatly to career strategies of individual business persons.

"Evaluation Standards by the HR professional" by Futoshi Nishio

I believe that it is quite essential for all the business persons to set reasonable goals and objectives, make efforts to achieve them, and be evaluated and get feedbacks from others. However, as is often the case, these important elements are not well-designed in your working environment. Then this book works well. If you are wondering about your goals and objectives, this book clearly tells you how you should behave and grow in a common environment.

"This is how I make profits for 23 consecutive years by treasuring employees" by Nobuyuki Kondo

If you are fed up with your company being not interested in employees' career development at all, you might be able to make a beginning from this book. This book tells you the importance of proactive actions to educate and motivate employees by board members.

Favorite Books for Marketing

"Let's Achieve the Sense of Market" by Chikirin

The famous Japanese blogger, Chikirin, wrote this book to describe how you can achieve the sense of marketing the most easily. This book is full of easy-to-understand examples so you can read it smoothly even if you don't know anything about marketing.

"Handwritten Strategies" by Mitsuaki Isobe

This book simply describes 7 marketing communication methods of how you can communicate with consumers to sell your products. If you are not well-aware of marketing communications, this is the first book to take.

"Artist Entrepreneur" by Takashi Murakami

This book is mainly about art, and you might wonder why I selected this book for learning marketing. The point is that marketing works everywhere, and his strategy to make great art in the world's market is full of marketing ideas. If you have already learnt marketing but wonder how you use your marketing knowledge in your job, this book must give a perfect example to motivate you.

Other Favorite Books

"Meeting by Kashiwa Sato" by Kashiwa Sato

Are you fed up with long, boring and inefficient meetings in your company? If so, then you must read this book. This book tells you what you should do before, during, and after your meetings to make your whole job extremely efficient and effective.

"First Class, Second Class, and Third Class of Salespersons" by Masayasu Iba

This book tells you very concrete examples of good actions by salespersons compared with bad ones. To my surprise, these good examples are useful not only for salespersons but also for any employees who works with employees from other departments in their same companies because the essence of this book is how we should care about others to work with.

"Textbook to Entrust" by Haruaki Deguchi

This textbook tells you the key difference between the ideal working style of players and that of managers, and warns that what is called playing managers should not be adopted in any organizations. Instead, this textbook describes how managers should play a role as a manager by entrusting jobs to players. This textbook is good not only for managers but also for players because this implies how players should be entrusted from their bosses.

"Professional Objective Setting Skill" by Kumiko Shimizu

If you wonder how the word "problem" is different from the word "objective", this is the book for you. When talking in English, the difference is much clearer. But when talking in Japanese, problem (mondai) and objective (kadai) are often mis-used. This book tells you how you can distinguish between these similar words to improve your skill greatly as a business leader. This is my most favorite among all the books on this post.

I hope that any of the books above stimulates your motivation on your job!