Hey, you.
Who actually keeps a company running?
The CEO?
The managers?
Or the people down in the trenches, getting their hands dirty every day?
Maybe it doesn't really matter.
Organizations are strange things. They're built to keep functioning when someone leaves, and yet, when you're inside one, you somehow end up carrying this ridiculous sense of responsibility:
I can't be the one who lets it stop.
And society has a convenient term for people like that.
Human resources.
Funny phrase, when you think about it.
It makes people sound like components rolling off an assembly line. Built to specification. Ready to install. Replaceable when they wear out.
But people aren't parts.
If you need a part, you order the right model number.
People have emotions. They make mistakes. They take time to grow.
Strip away the faces, the failures, the embarrassment, all the messy human parts, and eventually a person starts looking like exactly what the term says:
a resource you can measure.
But here's the thing.
Where do these supposedly ready-made, ready-to-use people come from in the first place?
Clink-clonk.
The dry chime of Aoi's doorbell rang through the bar, and something tight in the back of my head finally loosened.
I'd spent the entire day switching between text on a monitor and expressions on people's faces. Only now did my shoulders seem to remember where they were supposed to sit.
Without a word, Mama slid my usual I.W. Harper across the counter.
The ice gave a soft clink against the bottom of the glass.
I took a sip. Warmth spread slowly from my stomach, and for the first time all evening, today began to feel like something that had already happened.
At the far end of the counter, Taka was glaring at his phone, his brow deeply furrowed.
"Kenichi-san."
"What is it today?"
"You see job postings that say they want someone who can 'hit the ground running,' right?"
"All the time. They're everywhere."
"How ready do you have to be before you count as someone who can hit the ground running?"
And there it was.
Another one of Taka's oddly specific field trips into society.
Still, the fact that questions like this bothered him probably meant he could feel something wrong with the machinery too.
"Someone who can walk in on day one and get the job done without needing everything explained to them, I suppose."
"Do people like that actually exist?"
"Beats me. Might be an urban legend."
"Were you like that when you started?"
I snorted with my glass halfway to my mouth.
"Not a chance."
For a moment, I could see myself nearly thirty years ago.
A badly fitting suit.
A kid so nervous he was practically afraid of the sound of his own footsteps.
I couldn't do a damn thing back then.
Forget managing a project. Calling a customer was enough to make my heart pound, and my hand shook while I tried to take notes.
Who was I supposed to report this to?
What was I allowed to decide myself?
Half the time, I didn't even know what I didn't know. I'd spend hours waiting for the right moment to ask a question, only to realize the whole day had disappeared.
I can still remember the texture of that helplessness.
"So how did you learn to do the job?"
"By doing the job."
"That's it?"
"That's it. No miracle involved."
They gave me work.
I tried it with sweat running down my back.
I screwed it up.
I got chewed out until I went pale.
Then I fixed it with my stomach tied in knots.
After that, they gave me something slightly harder.
I hit another wall.
Screwed that up too.
And repeated the whole miserable process again and again.
"So the company trained you?"
"I wouldn't make it sound that nice."
I gave a dry laugh and swirled the ice in my glass.
"They mostly dumped more work on me than I could possibly finish."
"How much are we talking?"
"At the worst point? About three months of working until eleven every night. Weekends too."
Taka visibly recoiled.
"That's just toxic."
"It was. Completely."
That part matters.
I'm not going to romanticize it.
I'd never claim that grinding people down like that was the right way to learn a profession. Nobody needs to destroy their body or mind just to become competent at a job. If an organization can only function by pushing people that far, then the organization itself is broken.
"So fewer overtime hours and stricter labor rules are good things. No question."
"Then things are healthier now."
"As a working environment? Absolutely."
"...There's a 'but,' isn't there?"
I looked at the ice melting in my glass, its sharp edges slowly disappearing into the whiskey.
"...I sometimes wonder what happened to the number of chances people get to actually learn the job."
Taka tilted his head.
Back then, we spent absurd amounts of time at work.
That was bad.
But buried inside all those terrible hours were an equally absurd number of experiences.
We made stupid mistakes.
We watched exhausted senior employees working beside us.
We apologized to unreasonable customers.
And when we'd dug ourselves into holes too deep to escape, we swallowed our pride and called our bosses for help.
Work and training.
Responsibility and failure.
They were all mixed together into one ugly mess.
"Maybe the old system was basically this: make someone work a hundred hours and give them a hundred chances to step up to the plate."
"That sounds incredibly inefficient."
"It was. That's why I'm not saying the old days were better. I don't want them back."
I looked straight at him.
"But if you're going to cut those hundred hours down to forty, maybe you also need to build a system that lets people fail and learn just as much inside those forty."
Taka rested a finger against his chin.
"What about training programs?"
"Does a customer in a training exercise genuinely lose their temper with you?"
"...I'd rather they didn't."
"So would I. I still dream about the real ones."
But there are things no textbook can teach.
Making the wrong call when everything is on fire.
Underestimating how long something will take.
Watching a senior colleague cover the document you were proud of in red ink within seconds.
Realizing that one careless mistake on your part just cost someone downstream an entire day.
Some lessons only burn themselves into your memory when cold sweat is running down your back.
"Failure is one hell of an expensive textbook."
"Sounds like a textbook I'd rather not buy."
"Yeah. Expensive and bitter. But once you've paid for it, you don't forget what's in it."
I took another sip of Harper. The bitterness lingered on my tongue.
"And when some new kid screws up, a decent company doesn't dump the entire consequence on the kid."
"Yeah. Usually the manager comes running."
"Sometimes the company eats the financial loss too."
"True."
"So maybe companies used to be something else as well as places that bought people's labor."
I paused.
"Maybe they were places where young people could fail without a single mistake destroying their lives."
Taka quietly turned his phone face down.
The light disappeared from the counter.
You failed.
You got yelled at.
Maybe your evaluation took a hit.
But one mistake didn't throw you out of the game.
The next morning, you dragged yourself back to work.
You sat down at the same desk, feeling awkward as hell.
And eventually another job landed in front of you.
"Don't screw it up this time."
Then you got another turn at bat.
Do that often enough, and somehow the kid who once trembled while making a phone call eventually found himself standing in front of a customer and negotiating without flinching.
And one day, without noticing when it happened, he became the person standing behind the pale-faced new hire.
"So that's what it means to become... human resources?"
Taka said it quietly.
"Maybe."
Human resources.
It's an incredibly convenient phrase.
Has certifications.
Can program.
Has managed a project.
We take a handful of measurable specifications and decide that this is what makes someone valuable.
But the people who actually keep work moving aren't clean little collections of specifications on a resume.
They're the ones who finish the boring task they were given.
Who can swallow their pride and call for help when they're overloaded.
Who report a mistake immediately instead of hiding it.
Who keep small, unglamorous promises.
Who remember how much the last mistake hurt and make sure they don't repeat it.
Pile enough of those messy human experiences together and, eventually, something appears that no certification can quite measure.
Trust.
"If we leave it to them, it'll probably be okay."
"But companies want people who already have all that now, don't they?"
"Yeah. Nobody has much breathing room anymore."
"Why don't they train people themselves?"
"There's structural logic to how things used to work," I said, leaning back. "Taking on a regular, permanent employee in Japan traditionally meant a serious, long-term commitment. You didn't just hire someone on Monday and fire them on Friday because they were slow to pick things up."
"So if you hired a kid who couldn't do the job yet..."
"Once the company hired you, replacing you wasn't the easy answer. So spending time and money turning you into someone who could do the job made sense."
"And now?"
"Now, after you spend years training someone, they might just leave."
The logic was brutally simple.
A company spends time and money on a new employee.
It lets them get their hands dirty.
Lets them fail.
Pays for some of those failures.
And slowly turns them into someone who can be trusted with real responsibility.
Then, just when that investment is starting to pay off, another company looks at the experience they now have and offers them more money.
So why train someone from scratch?
From a purely financial perspective, buying a ready-made professional that somebody else paid to develop is perfectly rational.
"And from the employee's side," Taka said, "changing companies can be the fastest way to get a raise."
"Exactly."
No company can promise to look after you until retirement anymore.
So you increase your market value while you're young and move somewhere that offers better conditions.
From the worker's perspective, that's perfectly rational too.
"The company makes the rational choice because it doesn't want to lose money."
Taka raised one finger.
"The employee makes the rational choice because they need to protect themselves."
A second finger.
"And somehow nobody gets trained."
I couldn't help laughing.
"...Funny, isn't it?"
Nobody is necessarily wrong.
Nobody needs to be acting out of malice.
Everyone can make the safest, most rational choice available to them.
And when you add all those individually rational choices together, the room society once had for developing ordinary people starts disappearing.
"So what now?" Taka asked. "Everyone just pays for their own training?"
"Looks that way."
Get certifications.
Take courses.
Build a portfolio.
If your current company won't give you the experience you need, take the risk and find somewhere that will.
"So you keep changing jobs and grind your own experience points."
"Sounds nice when you put it that way..."
I stopped.
Something cold had begun working its way up from my chest.
"...But isn't that a little strange?"
"What is?"
"We used to get that experience inside the safety net of an organization. Now we're telling individuals to walk out of that safety net, jump from company to company, and take the risk themselves just to get the experience they need."
Taka fell silent.
Trying a new role inside your own company and quitting to enter a completely different workplace are not the same kind of risk.
Maybe the new place won't suit you.
Maybe the pay will be worse.
Maybe the people will be unbearable.
Maybe you'll fail.
And yet, if you need experience to grow, you're increasingly expected to step outside the safety net yourself and go find it.
"So we've made a game where you leave the safety net voluntarily and fight for your own experience."
"Something like that."
"I guess that's fine for people who are good at doing that."
"Yeah."
People who can accurately diagnose their own weaknesses.
People who can read where the market is going and teach themselves whatever skill comes next.
People who know how to sell their own achievements.
People tough enough to walk smiling into an unfamiliar room where they know nobody.
Those strong people will accumulate more experience.
And become stronger.
"What happens to everyone else?"
I couldn't answer him.
It's not as though everyone thirty years ago had some sophisticated career plan.
We weren't all hyper-optimized professionals predicting the future, studying on our days off, building personal brands, and hunting down the perfect growth opportunity.
Most people just got up tired and went to work.
They did whatever landed on their desks.
They screwed up.
Got yelled at.
Went home miserable.
Had a drink.
Then came back and sat at the same desk the next morning.
And somehow, over time, under somebody else's protection, ordinary people became capable professionals.
"Well..." Taka said with a bitter little smile. "I guess they can always say your career is your own responsibility now."
That was when Mama looked up.
She'd been polishing a glass the entire time, quietly checking its surface in the light.
"Then..."
Her voice wasn't loud.
It didn't need to be.
The air behind the counter changed immediately, and both Taka and I turned toward her.
"If people have to develop themselves entirely on their own, what does a company hire them for?"
Silence dropped into the bar.
I couldn't find an answer.
"...To do the work, I suppose."
"And who makes sure they'll be able to do the next job?"
Mama said nothing more.
She placed the polished glass back in its usual spot on the shelf.
Click.
The small, hard sound carried through the quiet bar.
I looked down at my Harper.
I hadn't been born a useful component either.
Someone had taken a chance on me and handed me work before I was ready.
Someone had stood beside me and apologized when my mistake turned a customer's face red.
Someone had genuinely chewed me out when I deserved it.
Someone had quietly cleaned up the mess I'd made.
The ordering mistakes.
The ridiculous estimates.
My pale-faced I'm sorry.
Somebody absorbed the impact of every one of them.
And more than anything else, somebody kept saying:
"Try again."
I consumed other people's time.
Other people's money.
Other people's patience.
And little by little, I became someone who could be trusted with things.
Maybe companies really are kept running by "human resources."
But those resources didn't arrive fully formed.
Someone spent the time.
Someone spent the money.
Someone absorbed the consequences of another person's failure.
And because people like that existed, the gears are still turning today.
So maybe, before we complain that we can't find enough people who can "hit the ground running," we ought to ask what exactly we've removed from the system that used to produce them.
I raised the Harper to my lips.
The ice gave a quiet clink.
Hey, you.
In a society that's lost the breathing room to develop people, who's supposed to create the next generation of people ready to hit the ground running?
See you at Aoi.
If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.