Time: 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Cost: FEW Members ¥2,000 / Guests ¥5,000 (supper and drinks included)
No advance reservation required.
Please note this is a women only event.

Venue: Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ), Yurakucho Denki Building, 20th Floor (http://www.fccj.or.jp/~fccjyod2/aboutus/map)

Speaker: William Reed, Director, AGILI, http://www.agili.jp

Topic: Enhancing Your Life as an Entrepreneur in Japan.

William Reed has spent nearly 35 years working in and with Japan, 24 of those years working as an entrepreneur. He is a bilingual author and speaker, with a dual career in business and the martial arts, spanning over 3 decades in Japan. Blending his talents in the arts with business, William is what he refers to as a `business artist.` For more information, you may like to read the recent Japan Times article featuring William http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fl20070120a1.html

For FEW members and guests on February 8, William will bring together his extensive knowledge and experience to speak on Enhancing Your Life as an Entrepreneur in Japan.

The subject will be aimed at practical tips for thinking and acting like an entrepreneur, whether or not you currently work for yourself.

• Personal branding to enhance your identity as an entrepreneur
• Gaining respect as a foreigner working in Japan
• Psychological traits for success as an entrepreneur
• Using technology to promote your business
• Tips for self-promotion in Japan

What makes William’s Japan business experience unique?

As an entrepreneur...
He has been self-employed in Japan since 1983, and established his own company in 1989. He worked for over 20 years as a business translator and automotive journalist, while also establishing the Japan office for a major US automotive aftermarket trade association. He is certified as a Master Trainer in Guerrilla Market-ing, and has also published books and newsletters on the subject.

As a bilingual speaker and trainer...
He has taught Guerrilla Marketing to DHL, Gibraltar Life Insurance, Brinks Japan, and Boehringer Ingelheim, and conducted seminars for the Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces. He lectures throughout Japan, apply-ing the martial arts metaphors of awareness, footwork, and energy to the practical problems of business, communication, and marketing.

As a published author and writer...
William first came to Japan in 1972 to study at Waseda University, earning a degree in Japanese language in 1974. He wrote a book in Japanese on Mind Mapping, which reached Number One on Amazon Japan, and sold over 50,000 copies. He contributes weekly to a Japanese-language blog site for well-known journal-ists.

As an artist...
He has a 7th-degree black belt in Aikido, has taught internationally, and written several books on Aikido and Japanese culture. He has a professional teaching license in Shodo, or Japanese brush calligraphy, and has exhibited at galleries and museums in Tokyo. He has been an amateur tap dancer for over 15 years.

In the media...
William has been featured in the media on numerous occasions ranging from Japanese television, business magazines, and newspapers.

For further information on William Reed, visit http://www.agili.jp

For further information on FEW, e-mail few@gol.com.

SUMMARY / UPDATE following the February Meeting

At the February 2007 FEW Meeting William Reed, Director of AGILI http://www.agili.jp spoke on Enhancing Your Life as an Entrepreneur in Japan.
He had spoken to FEW four years earlier in October 2003, on the topic of Guerrilla Marketing in Japan http://www.fewjapan.com/archives/000002.html, and at that time had offered us techniques for becoming ‘slightly famous.’ In the intervening four years he did this and more, and spoke to FEW members giving practical advice from his own experience that each person could adapt to her own situation.

William has spent nearly 35 years working in and with Japan, 24 of those years working as an entrepreneur. He is a bilingual author and speaker, with a dual career in business and the martial arts, spanning over 3 decades in Japan.
He began by asking the question, ‘’If you don’t know yourself, how can others know you?’’ He proposed that the way to do this was to find out how to get paid to do what you want to do. For many people, he says that life is a great divide between learning, work, and play. Somehow, over the years he has managed to blend them seamlessly together.

William traces his interest in Japan to a November afternoon in 1963, when as an 11-year old boy walking home from school, he was mugged by older bullies in a scenario that is played out in every city in every country on any particular day. For William it was a life-changing event, leading him the very next day to a book called The Power of Aikido, which began an interest in Japanese culture and the martial arts that brought him to Japan 9 years later. This began a career in Aikido already spanning 35 years, and international recognition as a 7th-degree black belt.

He said that if he ever met up with those bullies again...he would thank them profusely for setting him on a path that he might otherwise never have taken!

Though he has practiced and taught Aikido for years, his decision to become an entrepreneur was based on a desire to widen the path of dojo practice to encompass work and personal life. He now shares the lessons of energy, awareness, and footwork from the martial arts to a much broader audience. His concept is AGILI, the Path of Mastery leading to Agility in business and personal life.

His talk was based on three themes which can help foreign entrepreneurs gain an advantage in an otherwise challenging environment.

GAIN INSIDER ACCESS AND RESPECT
A challenge in any foreign culture, Japanese is a particularly difficult language for foreigners to master. Japanese people appreciate the difficulty of this, having struggled to learn English themselves, and don’t expect foreigners to be fluent in Japanese. However, William claims that you can gain a surprising degree of respect and insider access by learning Japanese culture and body language.
He gave FEW members a head start on doing this by sharing his January newsletter that addressed just that topic, which you can download at: http://www.agili.jp/images/stories/agili_mastery_jan_07.pdf

William has certainly proven this himself. Over his career he has acquired a certificate for a correspondence course he took in Japanese on Power Mechanics, which he did to acquire the technical automotive vocabulary to support his work at the time as a translator and automotive journalist. Later, he did training for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces, and was introduced to the Vice Admiral, not a person that is easy for foreigners to access.

AFFILIATE YOURSELF WITH A PRIMAL BRAND
Next William introduced a powerful concept that he has used himself to good effect, affiliating yourself with a Primal Brand, a well-known brand such as Apple, Starbucks, Google, Disney, and even the Rolling Stones, which even more than product benefits and price attracts loyalty because of certain primal elements.

These elements he explained, are a Creation Story, Creed, Icons, Rituals, Pagans, Sacred Words, and a Leader, as expounded by Patrick Hanlon in his book Primal Branding. What is unique about William’s approach is affiliating yourself with a Primal Brand, a strategy which the author himself told William was brilliant.

How did he do this? He started by doing a presentation last December at the Apple Store theater in Ginza. Their requirement for using their facility? Having an interesting business topic that demonstrated skillful use of Apple software on a Macintosh computer.

For this presentation he demonstrated his affiliation with another Primal Brand, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, the international bestseller by William’s good friend and colleague Michael J. Gelb. In fact, William has not only arranged and produced the Japanese translation of this book, but is also producing a series of Workshops in which people can experience and practice the 7 Principles of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which were developed by Michael J. Gelb, and now have international recognition.

Getting your message out in the media is an important step in getting yourself known to others, and William has not missed an opportunity to do this. FEW participants were given an opportunity to read the article about William Reed which appeared recently in THE JAPAN TIMES entitled, Master of agility celebrates the Renaissance mani, which you can read online at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fl20070120a1.html

The synchronicity of this is nearly perfect, as 2007 is also the Year of Italy in Japan, and will be marked by dozens of events introducing Italian culture, lifestyle, history, design, and technology. This is truly also the Year of Leonardo da Vinci.

DEVELOP A PLATFORM FOR ACCESSIBILITY
No matter how clear your message is in your mind, it won’t be clear to other people until you establish a platform and regularly deliver your message from it. This is basic training for Guerrilla Marketing, in which William is also certified as a Master Trainer.

William has developed a number of platforms for this purpose. In addition to his One Page Newsletter, Will Reed’s Agili MASTERY, he has also published books including a number one Amazon Japan bestseller on Mind Mapping in Japanese, and he has a Japanese blog on a site reserved for well-known Japanese journalists at http://www.the-commons.jp. And he regularly speaks to groups like FEW and both Japanese and foreign Chambers of Commerce.

William was generous in sharing information on his Top 10 reading list, his Recommended Books on Marketing and Personal Branding, and is still happy to share a copy of this list with anyone who requests it directly from William at willreed@agili.jp. He calls it the "best investment in books an entrepreneur can make."

He summarized his talk by recommending that FEW members could enhance their lives as an entrepreneur, or enhance their careers by aligning actions with your life purpose; looking good in print, on screen, and in person; affiliating yourself with a primal brand; using images, metaphors, and stories; overcoming technophobia and marketing yourself; and networking with your personal brand.

He ended his talk by donating for the FEW drawing a piece of his own calligraphy, the brush strokes Reidan Jichi, meaning Know hot and cold by experience, a Zen proverb by Master Dogen.

Moreover, the end of the talk is not the end of the walk.

Since William’s talk for FEW members in February, the DaVincian book has come out in Japanese http://www.chukei.co.jp/cgi-bin/books/detail.rb?o_id=2658. which is destined to become a bestseller.

William has announced a series of 6 Workshops for a DaVincian Lifestyle that he is producing and co-presenting in English and Japanese in the coming months. Through these workshops, participants will be able to experience the 7 principles of DaVincian thinking first hand, and gain skills and feedback which they can immediately apply to enhancing their lives, not just as entrepreneurs, but as human beings.
For more information on these workshops, which begin in March, visit his website at http://www.agili.jp or contact William Reed directly at willreed@agili.jp.