The screen glows with the subject line, an optimistic little dagger: ‘Exciting Team Announcement!’ You don’t even need to open it. You know. The corporate ether has been humming with this specific frequency for weeks, the kind of low-grade rumor that’s true 93% of the time. You click anyway. And there it is. A professional headshot, teeth gleaming, beside a paragraph of effusive praise. Markus is the new Director.

Markus, who speaks in frameworks and thinks in slide decks. Markus, who can hold a room of executives captive for 43 minutes discussing the strategic imperatives of synergy, a word he has yet to define. He is a master of the conspicuous gesture, the performative question, the follow-up email that summarizes what everyone else just said. His primary skill is the appearance of productivity. He is a magnificent actor playing the role of a leader, and he just got a standing ovation.

Buried at the bottom, after three paragraphs extolling Markus’s ‘visionary leadership,’ is the customary nod. ‘A special thanks to Lena, whose tireless efforts on the backend architecture were instrumental.’ Instrumental. A word that positions her as a tool, a useful object that helped the real hero-Markus-achieve his destiny. Lena, who hasn’t spoken more than 23 words in a single meeting this quarter. Lena, who built the damn thing. Lena, who is now expected to report to the man who thinks an API is a type of craft beer.

This isn’t a tragedy. It’s a system functioning as designed. We have this comforting myth that organizations are meritocracies, that the best and brightest bubble up to the top. It’s a lie we tell ourselves to make the daily grind palatable. The truth is that organizations don’t promote competence. They promote conformity packaged as confidence. They promote the most visible, the least threatening, the most articulate narrator of other people’s work. It’s a selection process for corporate theater, and the best actors get the lead roles.

I blame myself, partly. I used to be a zealot for ‘soft skills.’ I’d preach that technical ability was just the entry fee; communication, I argued, was the differentiator. And it is. But I was wrong about what kind of communication matters. I championed the slick presenters, the ones who could make a Gantt chart sing. I once recommended a guy-let’s call him David-for a team lead position almost entirely because of one spectacular 13-minute presentation. He was brilliant at packaging complex ideas. He was also, as his team discovered over the next six agonizing months, completely incapable of making a decision or writing a single functional line of code. He managed up, and the project fell apart from the bottom. I helped put him there. My bias for legible, presentable skill cost the team dearly. That failure tastes like stale coffee, even now.

It’s a nasty feedback loop. The people who are good at navigating the political landscape get promoted by the previous generation of political navigators. They, in turn, look for people who remind them of themselves: charming, articulate, and great in a meeting. Competence becomes a secondary, almost incidental, trait. The primary requirement is fluency in the language of management, a dialect that has less to do with building things and more to do with building consensus around the idea of building things.

The Invisible Master: Noah J.-C., Pipe Organ Tuner

It reminds me, strangely, of a man I met years ago named Noah J.-C. He was a pipe organ tuner. Think about that for a second. His job is to manage a relationship between thousands of individual components, from pipes the size of a pencil to wooden behemoths 33 feet tall. He works in cavernous, empty spaces, often in the dead of night, to ensure absolute silence. His only tools are a keen ear, a set of specialized blades and cones, and a patience that borders on the divine. He’s not performing for anyone. No one is watching. The quality of his work is only revealed when someone else-the organist-uses it to create something beautiful. His expertise is foundational, critical, and almost entirely invisible. He is the corporate equivalent of Lena.

How do you measure Noah’s performance in a quarterly review? He has no KPIs. He sends no enthusiastic emails. He presents no forward-looking slide decks on the future of pneumatic action. He just quietly, methodically, makes the whole damn thing work. He tunes the fundamentals. In our world, we’ve forgotten how to value the tuners. We’re too busy applauding the people who are great at describing the music.

We reward the proxy, not the work itself. We measure lines of code, but not their elegance. We count hours worked, not the value created. We track meeting attendance, but not the quality of the contribution. It’s the difference between describing a brilliant market strategy in a meeting and actually executing it. In the real world of outcomes, rhetoric is worthless. It’s like trying to win by just talking about your moves; you need a space to test theories against reality, which is why a good stock market simulator for beginners is so valuable. It strips away the performance and leaves only the result. You can’t talk your way into a profitable trade; you either make the right calls or you don’t. The numbers don’t lie, and they don’t care about your confidence.

And I have to admit, I get why we do it. I’m a hypocrite for even writing this. Evaluating deep, technical work is hard. It takes time and expertise that most managers, themselves promoted for their soft skills, simply don’t have. It’s so much easier to reward the person who makes us feel good, the one who tells a compelling story, the one who reflects our own idea of what a leader should look and sound like. It’s a cognitive shortcut. Choosing Markus is easy. Recognizing the genius of Lena requires actual effort.

So we build these magnificent, complex machines of commerce and then hand the controls to the people who are best at talking about flying. They learn the vocabulary, memorize the checklist, and look fantastic in the uniform. But when the turbulence hits, they don’t know what the 153 blinking lights on the console actually mean.

They just know how to schedule a meeting to discuss them.

The Real Cost: Organizational Decay

The real cost isn’t just a few frustrated experts or a delayed project. The cost is organizational decay. It’s a slow, creeping rot that starts in the middle and hollows the company out. Each promotion of a performer over a practitioner is another vote for style over substance, another layer of insulation between the decision-makers and the reality of the work. Eventually, the entire structure is run by a committee of actors, all giving brilliant performances in a play about a successful company, while the real company crumbles around them.

I saw Noah just once more, years later. He was working on a colossal instrument with 8,333 pipes in a new concert hall. I asked him what the hardest part of his job was. I expected him to say something about the complexity or the solitude. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Getting people to understand that the silence between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves.’ He spends his life calibrating the potential for music, the space in which quality can exist. And that’s what we’re missing. We’re so obsessed with the noise of work-the meetings, the emails, the announcements-that we’ve forgotten to listen for the silence. The quiet, focused, invisible hum of actual competence. That’s where the real music is.