Scanning the room, I watched Marcus adjust his tie for the 11th time while the hum of the overhead projector filled the silence. He was leaning over the mahogany table, gesturing at a slide that contained exactly zero lines of functional code, yet the board was nodding as if he’d just mapped the human genome. It was a Tuesday-the kind of day where the air feels heavy with the scent of overpriced espresso and unearned confidence. I had spent the morning cleaning out my refrigerator, throwing away a jar of relish that expired in 2021 and a bottle of soy sauce that had somehow survived three moves. There is something visceral about tossing out things that have lost their essence but are still taking up space. It felt like a metaphor for the meeting I was currently suffering through.
Marcus is a ‘consensus builder.’ In the corporate lexicon, that’s often code for someone who spends 41 hours a week talking about work so they never actually have to do any. Across from him sat Sarah, the lead engineer. She had stayed up until 3:01 AM three nights in a row fixing the catastrophic leak in the payment gateway. She was quiet, her eyes tracing the grain of the wood, her mind likely already three steps ahead on the next deployment. When the promotion was announced, it wasn’t Sarah’s name that echoed off the glass walls. It was Marcus. The politician had beaten the practitioner. Again.
The Cannibalism of Competence
This isn’t just a localized tragedy; it is the structural rot of the modern workplace. We have entered an era where visibility has completely cannibalized competence. The skills required to climb a ladder-self-promotion, strategic networking, and the ability to speak in vague, soaring metaphors-are fundamentally disconnected from the skills required to build the ladder itself. We are promoting people to lead departments they don’t understand, based on their ability to perform ‘leadership’ in a controlled environment. It is the Peter Principle on steroids, filtered through a lens of LinkedIn-ready charisma.
I think about Camille L.-A. often in these moments. As a dyslexia intervention specialist, she spends her days working with kids whose brains are wired to see the world in 3D patterns but struggle to decode the 2D symbols we call letters. She once told me about a 11-year-old student who could dismantle and reassemble a lawnmower engine without a manual but was labeled ‘slow’ because he couldn’t pass a standardized reading test in 51 minutes. The system wasn’t measuring his intelligence; it was measuring his compliance with a specific, narrow medium of expression. The corporate world does the same. It doesn’t measure your output; it measures your ‘optics.’ If you are a brilliant engineer who doesn’t know how to play the game of optics, you are, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
– The Medium is the Message
[The Theater of the Invisible]
The Incentive Structure of Lying
There is a specific kind of grief in watching a meritocracy collapse into a popularity contest. We pretend that hard work is the primary driver of success, but that’s a lie we tell to keep the gears turning. In reality,
71 percent of career advancement is tied to who knows what you’re doing, rather than the quality of what you’re doing. This creates a perverse incentive structure.
Incentive Mapping (Proxy Metrics vs. Output)
If I know that spending 21 minutes crafting a witty update on the internal Slack channel will yield more recognition than 5 hours of deep, focused work, I am economically and socially incentivized to choose the Slack channel. Over time, this filters for a leadership class that is excellent at navigating bureaucracy but incompetent at navigating reality.
I’ve made this mistake myself. Years ago, I focused so hard on ‘doing the work’ that I forgot to tell anyone I was doing it. I assumed the results would speak for themselves. They didn’t. Results are mute. They require a narrator. If you don’t provide the narration, someone like Marcus will step in and provide it for you, often taking the credit while you’re still cleaning the grease off your hands. It’s a bitter pill, one that tastes like that expired relish I tossed this morning-sharp, slightly fermented, and entirely unnecessary if I’d just paid attention sooner.
Where Theater Fails: The Honest Auditor
In the corporate world, you can fake a KPI for 41 weeks. You can use jargon to mask a lack of direction and use ‘synergy’ to hide a lack of substance. But there are places where that theater falls apart instantly. You cannot ‘build consensus’ with a storm. You cannot ‘align stakeholders’ with a 301-pound tuna that is currently trying to pull you into the Pacific. That is why I find myself gravitating toward environments where the result is the only thing that matters.
I think about the crews at
Cabo San Lucas fishing charters-on a boat, the hierarchy is built on who can read the water, who can maintain the engines, and who can actually bring the fish on deck. If the captain is a ‘charismatic talker’ who can’t find the marlin, the business dies. The ocean is a brutal, honest auditor. It doesn’t care about your slide deck.
The Cost of Silence
Camille L.-A. sees this in her interventions too. She sees how the ‘loud’ kids, the ones who can mirror the teacher’s language, get the resources, while the quiet, brilliant ones who process information differently are left to wither. She spends 101 hours a month just trying to convince these kids that their silence isn’t a lack of capacity. I wish someone would do that for the engineers and the creators in our offices. We are losing our best people to a system that refuses to see them because they aren’t wearing a costume.
The True Measure of Value
If we want to fix this, we have to stop rewarding the performance. We have to start valuing the ‘quiet competence’ that actually keeps the lights on. This requires a radical shift in how we evaluate talent. Instead of asking ‘Who has the most potential?’ which is almost always a proxy for ‘Who looks most like a leader?’ we should be asking:
‘Whose absence would cause the most immediate collapse?’
That is your real leader. That is your Sarah.
It’s a paradox because the people who are best suited to lead are often the ones least interested in the performative aspects of leadership. They find the posturing distasteful. They find the politics exhausting. So they stay where they are, or they leave to start their own thing, leaving the original organization to be governed by the Marcuses of the world. This is how companies enter a death spiral. The competence leaves, the visibility stays, and eventually, there’s nothing left to be visible about. It’s just an empty stage with a very expensive lighting rig.
Organizational Health
15% Remaining Potential
I realized this morning, as I looked at my clean refrigerator shelves, that maintenance is invisible work. You only notice the fridge when it smells. You only notice the engineer when the site goes down. We have to start noticing the lack of smell. We have to start rewarding the people who prevent disasters before they happen, rather than the people who show up with a fire extinguisher and a camera crew once the building is already half-ash. I think about the 111 emails I ignored last week because I was actually writing. I felt guilty about it at the time, but now I realize that guilt was a symptom of the disease. The emails are the theater; the writing is the work.
We need to build organizations that function more like a high-end fishing vessel and less like a high-school drama club. We need to value the person who knows where the fish are, even if they aren’t very good at talking about them. Because at the end of the day, you can’t eat a slide deck. You can’t sail a mission statement. And you certainly can’t build a future on the backs of people who are only good at getting promoted.
I’m going to go back into that meeting room now. Marcus is still talking. He’s up to slide 31. I’m going to sit next to Sarah. I’m going to ask her a technical question about the database, loud enough for the board to hear, just to watch Marcus stumble. It’s a small act of rebellion, a tiny ripple in the theater of the invisible, but it’s a start. We have to start making the competence visible, one uncomfortable question at a time. Otherwise, we’re all just waiting for the relish to expire while we pretend we’re having a feast.