The email notification slides onto the screen, a sterile white rectangle announcing a change in the hierarchy. A promotion. Not yours. It’s for him. The guy who produces maybe half of what you do but whose calendar is a public testament to corporate endurance, a brutalist architecture of stacked meetings: three high-profile ‘task forces,’ daily ‘syncs,’ and bi-weekly ‘strategic alignments.’ The echo of your last performance review with your manager comes back, a flat, airless sound in the memory of your ears. “You do great work,” they’d said, the words carefully separated from any real meaning, “but you need to increase your visibility.”

The Phantom of Visibility

Visibility. I’ve been turning that word over in my mind for 11 days. It’s a word that sounds positive, proactive. It sounds like something you can control. But it’s a phantom. It’s a corporate euphemism for something much simpler and much more corrosive: you need to be seen in more meetings. It isn’t a request to improve your craft, generate more revenue, or solve a difficult problem. It is a command to perform presence. It’s a directive to shift your energy from the workshop to the stage, even if the stage is just a poorly lit conference room with a failing Polycom.

So I tried it. I really did. I saw it as a puzzle to be solved, a system to be gamed. I volunteered for the ‘Next-Gen Workflow Optimization Initiative.’ I spent 41 hours in a single month in rooms, both physical and virtual, talking about doing work. We debated frameworks. We argued over the precise definition of ‘synergy.’ We produced a 231-slide deck on ‘Best Practices for Inter-departmental Communication.’ The primary best practice, we concluded after an exhaustive analysis, was to form another, more specialized committee to explore the issue further. My output plummeted. My actual, tangible work that moves the needle for the business suffered. But my visibility? It soared. I was seen. I was present. I was glowing with the dull hum of corporate radiation. And I hated every single second of it. I felt like a fraud, a meeting parasite.

The Truth in a C Sharp Major Chord

It’s a bizarre paradox, because we celebrate practitioners. We admire the people who can actually do the thing. My cousin, Drew A.J., is a pipe organ tuner. His work is the complete antithesis of corporate visibility. He spends weeks, sometimes months, alone in vast, empty cathedrals with a bag of specialized tools and an ear trained over decades to discern microscopic deviations in pitch. He is not on a task force. His work is not collaborative. He doesn’t have a weekly sync to report his progress on the Mixture V rank. His performance is measured by a single, brutally honest metric: does the C sharp major chord sound like a divine proclamation or a dying machine? There is no memo that can spin the result. The work speaks for itself, in a voice that fills a thousand cubic feet of air. The organ is either in tune, or it is not. The truth is absolute.

We have built entire corporate ecosystems where the truth is optional. We have engineered career ladders that reward the performance of work over the execution of work. The person who is best at talking about the code, not the person who writes the cleanest, most efficient code, is promoted to lead the engineering team. The person who crafts the most compelling slides about market strategy, not the one who has the deepest, most intuitive insight into the customer, becomes the VP of Marketing. We are systematically, generation after generation, filtering for the best performers of process, not the best doers of craft. This is the great competence inversion, and it’s happening right now, in every all-hands meeting you’re forced to attend.

The organization is being hollowed out from the middle up.

It’s a game, but one with nonsensical rules and a broken scoreboard. You collect experience points by having your name appear on an attendee list. Your power-ups are action items that you successfully delegate to someone else. The final boss is a four-hour quarterly steering committee meeting that accomplishes less than a single well-written email. It’s a frustrating, inefficient game, designed to reward endurance, not skill. It’s nothing like the games we choose for ourselves, the ones where the rules are clear and merit is the only currency that matters. In those worlds, progress is tangible and honest. You complete a quest, you gain experience. You win a match, your rank increases. There’s no manager telling you to ‘increase your visibility in the lobby.’ You simply play. To get ahead, you get better, or you get the right resources. It’s a direct, honest transaction-you put in the effort or the currency and see the result, like getting a شحن يلا لودو to keep the momentum going. It’s a clear input for a clear output, a simple equation of cause and effect. The corporate world has forgotten how to do this math.

Agitated Algae in the Void

This obsession with being seen reminds me of bioluminescent algae in the ocean. They only glow when they’re agitated. It’s a defense mechanism, a panic response. They aren’t creating light to build anything or to navigate. They are simply making a lot of visible noise to scream “I’m here! Don’t eat me!” into the void. That is what so much of modern meeting culture feels like. A frantic, glowing display of presence to avoid being seen as redundant by the big fish of restructuring. We are all just agitated algae, bumping into each other in the dark, hoping our glow is just bright enough to be mistaken for importance. And then we call the brightest, most consistently agitated glowers ‘leaders.’

Last month, Drew A.J. finished tuning the 19th-century organ at a historic cathedral. It took him 101 hours of intense, solitary focus. His total budget for the project was $11,001. When he was finished, he didn’t send a summary email with key takeaways. He didn’t schedule a post-mortem to discuss learnings. He just sat on the bench, pulled the stops for the Principal chorus, and played a single, perfect C major chord. The sound, pure and correct and utterly true, was his report. It was his visibility. It was the work. It filled every corner of that sacred space, a testament to skill, not presence. And I wonder how many of our modern leaders, with their overflowing calendars and strategic synergy task forces, could produce a single, true chord if their career depended on it. What happens when the building is actually on fire, and the only people with a key to the fire extinguisher are locked in a meeting, debating the optimal framework for a new fire-escape policy?