Once you're well rehearsed on what you're going to say in an interview, you can focus on your interaction with an interviewer. Body language is a key feedback mechanism, and will help you change the pitch and tempo of your interaction. Sales people and managers with a sales background learn naturally to read the other...

Getting fired is always a traumatic experience. But for foreign senior executives, the experience is particularly humiliating. Tokyo is a small town, and people quickly notice a high-flyer getting shot down. Also, corporate politics is unpredictable, especially if you're the only foreigner in a Japanese managed company – even a foreign company – in Japan. I find that foreign firms often...

Following on from the topic of off-shoring as a company is that of working remotely as an individual. How do you get and keep a job which lets you live in the countryside, or even overseas? This is a question I have often asked myself, in the delicious anticipation of retiring one day – perhaps to a cottage by the sea, and far from the HEAT of Tokyo. By "remote" I mean far...

A reader wrote in and asked about an article on overtime a while back, asking as an employer what the actual practical overtime rates actually are. This got me checking about the latest on the whole overtime issue, now that the economy is starting to move again, and what I found was interesting – it looks like the government is...