The Top 3 Holdover Skills Samurai Have Working in Corporate America

What a Warrior Caste Can Teach Us About Meetings That Should’ve Been Emails

You’re in a conference room. Someone from Product just said “let’s take this offline” for the third time in twenty minutes, and you’re gripping your laptop like it’s the hilt of a katana, wondering if dishonor by spreadsheet is covered in the Bushido code.

Look, I get it. The samurai-to-Silicon-Valley pipeline isn’t particularly well documented. Nobody’s writing LinkedIn think pieces about “What Miyamoto Musashi Can Teach Us About Quarterly OKRs” (though honestly, give it six months). But if you’re a former feudal warrior trying to make it in corporate America, you’ve got some advantages. Some skills transfer. Just not the ones you’d think.

1. Extreme Comfort with Meaningless Ritual

The samurai spent centuries perfecting the tea ceremony—an elaborately choreographed performance in which everyone pretends the precise angle of a ladle matters to the universe. Corporate America fucking loves this energy.

You know how to sit through a two-hour ceremony about water temperature while maintaining the appearance of deep spiritual engagement?

Congratulations, you’re overqualified for Sprint Planning.

The modern samurai understands that whether you’re arranging flowers in rigid adherence to ikebana principles or arranging a meeting agenda in rigid adherence to Scrum principles, the point is never the flowers. The point is demonstrating that you take the flowers seriously. That you respect the process. That you won’t be the one to stand up and say, “Why are we doing this?”

(Nobody ever says, “Why are we doing this?” Not in the Ashikaga shogunate, not in the agile retrospective.)

Your average corporate American is still learning this. They show up for the all-hands meeting expecting information transfer, only to get frustrated when nothing is shared. But you? You spent your formative years studying under a master who made you rake gravel for six months before teaching you sword techniques. You know that sometimes the ritual is the ritual, and the only winning move is to perfect your form while thinking about literally anything else.

Also—and this is key—you already own the right outfit. Business casual is just a hakama with worse ventilation.

2. Weaponized Politeness as Default Communication Mode

Here’s what they don’t tell you about samurai culture: everyone was so fucking polite to each other that entire wars got started because nobody wanted to directly say “no.”

This is perfect preparation for a corporate email.

When a samurai wanted to insult someone, they’d compose a haiku so subtle that scholars are still arguing about the subtext four hundred years later. When a Product Manager wants to insult Engineering, they write “per my last email.” It’s the same skill, just different distribution channels.

You already know how to:

• Express complete disagreement while using only respectful language

• Convey “you’re an idiot” through careful word choice and strategic pauses

• Maintain perfect courtesy while making it clear that honor demands you get your way

• Compliment someone in a way that makes them wonder if they’ve been insulted

This is just an email, but you’re not allowed to use swords.

The thing is, American corporate culture thinks it wants directness. It’s always going on about “radical candor” and “no bullshit” and “let’s be real here.” But the moment someone’s actually direct, everyone gasps and pretends to clutch their pearls, and someone from HR sends a calendar invite with the subject line “Quick sync?”

Samurai culture never had this confusion. Everyone understood that you were polite until you literally weren’t anymore, at which point someone was getting beheaded, and there was a clear line between the two states. Corporate America wants to be indirect while pretending to be direct, which is honestly more complicated, but you’ve got the core competency.

You can work with this.

3. Absolute Certainty That Your Boss Might Be an Idiot, But You Serve Anyway

Look, let’s talk about the actual through-line of samurai philosophy: you pick a lord, and then you follow that lord, and if that lord makes a catastrophically stupid decision that gets everyone killed, you die with honor knowing you did your part.

This is middle management.

The samurai code doesn’t say “serve a lord who is wise and just and makes good strategic decisions.” It says “serve a lord.” Pick one. Anyone. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the loyalty, not the object of loyalty. You think Tokugawa retainers were sitting around the castle going “you know, I’m not sure our long-term strategic vision is aligned with the broader market forces of the Sengoku period”?

No. They showed up, they did the work, they committed to the bit.

And here’s the thing: this is actually _easier_ than what your average American corporate worker is trying to do. They’re all trying to have it both ways—they want the stability and benefits of institutional employment, but they also want to maintain the belief that they’re choosing this company because it’s special, because the mission resonates, because they truly believe in the Series B pitch deck.

You don’t have this problem. You already know the company is not your family, the mission is not your purpose, and your manager is just some guy who ended up in charge through an arbitrary combination of timing and charisma. You know this because you literally watched the same thing happen in feudal Japan, except with more horses.

So when your VP announces a reorganization that makes no sense, you don’t take it personally. You don’t spend three weeks processing your feelings in Slack threads. You just bow (metaphorically), say “understood” (literally), and get back to work. Because you’re not here because you believe in the org chart. You’re here because you picked a house, and this is your house now, and you’ll defend it until you decide to go to a different house.

(Ideally without the seppuku, though honestly some exit meetings come close.)

---

The uncomfortable truth is that samurai and corporate workers are playing the same game, just with different aesthetics. Both systems run on hierarchy, ritual, and the collective agreement to take seriously things that don’t inherently matter. Both reward people who can master the form without questioning the function. Both are held together by elaborate structures of obligation that would collapse immediately if everyone stopped pretending.

The samurai just had cooler swords and better PR.

So if you’re making the transition from Edo-period warrior class to modern knowledge worker, you’re actually overqualified. You just need to swap the tea ceremony for the standup, the lord for the director, and the existential dread about honor for the existential dread about email.

Baby steps, I suppose.