[jpttsn]

It's nice to distinguish flaws in the national character, but it's very hard to change one thing (and that one thing only) about any system.

Have you considered the reasons behind self-promotion? What purpose does it serve? What circumstances allow self-promotion to exist, and what makes it necessary? How would the world look without this flaw, once the changes have propagated? Why is it a flaw?

[allochthon]

Have you considered the reasons behind self-promotion?

All good questions. I don't know for sure what it's rooted in and what it serves. I've lived abroad, and modesty is the norm for the most part, rather than selling oneself, and there's something refreshing in that. (But self-promotion isn't just an American thing, so one can't overgeneralize here.)

A corporate environment in which self-promotion was no longer necessary would look very different. For one, people with responsibility for decisions about promotions would be more observant.

[jpttsn]

Right. Managers would have to be not just more observant across the board, but especially good at noticing those who don't promote themselves, to compensate for those who do.

This becomes a high bar for managers. They must effectively cancel the effects of self promotion, so that rational employees move away from it. Then, assuming managers are at least ideally rational, something would have to motivate them to behave this way in turn.

If we were serious about removing this flaw in the system, we'd have to change a lot of other things to make room for it. It's easy to evaluate any one aspect of a system, but be careful not to abandon deeper analysis once the flaws have been found.