(New) The absurdity of a promotion-above-all value system

March 17, 2025
by Noriyuki Morimoto

Once upon a time in Japan, corporate employees destined to end their careers without attaining executive positions were called the “window-side tribe.” They were given idle positions and allowed to spend time at their desk, for some reason by the window, while being paid not much less than the executives. How could such a thing happen?

Perhaps behind the existence of the “window-side tribe” was the shared notion that valued promotion above everything else. This value system requires that employees constantly aim for promotion and strive to be appointed to a higher position than their current one. In order for this to be established as a norm within the company, the thinking goes, even an employee who was left out of the company’s selection for an executive position should still be treated similarly to an executive in economic terms.

And it seems that the essence of the seniority system was this belief in promotion as top priority. In other words, the seniority system was not actually a system of seniority in terms of promotion, but rather, under a rigorous promotion strategy based on talent, just monetary treatment was based on seniority. And conversely, it could be thought that monetary treatment based on seniority made it possible for a company to implement a strict talent-based promotion strategy.

In this case, what matters to the company is just its promotion strategy, and seniority-based compensation was probably just a necessary evil. So, when the business environment worsened in the Heisei era, the window-side tribe were promptly moved from the window-side to a windowless room and pressured to resign.

So, why was it that people aimed for promotion? If there was no significant difference in monetary compensation whether you did or didn’t get ahead, then there was no financial incentive to get ahead. Now that we think about it, it’s not necessarily clear why people wanted to be promoted. But perhaps being promoted was almost synonymous with working, and so the question of why people aimed for promotion was meaningless in the same way as the question of why people work.

And what is promotion in the first place? Promotion is about climbing up the hierarchy of a corporate organization one step at a time, and ultimately reaching the top to be president, but what did that mean? In the past, a president was not a management expert as we might imagine today, but simply the final destination of promotion and the end of the road to success. Therefore, the question of what promotion is and why it was sought is a circular one that goes back to nothingness. Promotion is absurd.

 

[Category /Work-Style Reform]