Managing the “Invisibles”

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Managing the “Invisibles”
by David Zweig

In October 2004 a skunkworks project called Lab126, staffed by brilliant and accomplished engineers, began a three-year venture developing a device that would revolutionize an industry. Just a year into the endeavor, the huge tech company behind it brought in an outside firm to create a key component of the product: its name.

Michael Cronan, the head of the firm, ultimately chose a word that means “to start a fire, to arouse.” The company that brought in Cronan is Amazon. The product is, of course, the Kindle. We might see product names as a mere afterthought to more serious concerns in an R&D process, but Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, felt differently. “Jeff wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio, way,” Karin Hibma, Cronan’s former business partner and now widow, said in an interview with the design journalist Steven Heller. The name had to strike just the right tone and provide a solid root for numerous expected spin-offs. “We didn’t want it to be ‘techie’ or trite.” Hibma went on to quote Voltaire: “The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

Michael Cronan’s thoughtful approach has produced numerous brand names that are embedded in our culture. Untold millions read, speak, and think about them every day. (One of Cronan’s earlier projects, TiVo—a device that few people today actually own—is still used as a verb for recording television shows.) Yet the name Michael Cronan itself is all but unknown. When I spoke with Hibma, who now runs the firm, I kept pressing her on the remarkability of her trade. After all, there are very few people in the world who can introduce words that penetrate a culture with near ubiquity. She admitted to occasions when she and Cronan would be on an airplane and notice Kindles in use around them. “I would mention to the person next to me that I’d had something to do with the name,” she said. But invariably, she would be met with “a confused look.” No one thinks about where names come from.

Michael Cronan is a member of a class I’ve come to call “Invisibles”: extremely capable and committed professionals who could easily succeed in high-profile careers but instead gravitate to work that is outside the spotlight. Invisibles work in a wide range of fields. They include people such as Dennis Poon, the lead structural engineer on some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. When we see a grand building, if we think of its structure at all we think of the architect. But without engineers like Poon, those towers wouldn’t stand. Other Invisibles I’ve met include an elite interpreter at the UN; a piano technician for a world-renowned symphony orchestra; a perfumer who’s created blockbuster fragrances for the likes of Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, and Tom Ford; and magazine fact-checkers. (When is the last time you read a great article and thought to yourself, Man, that was fact-checked beautifully!)

I have traveled around the U.S., to Europe, and to Asia to meet with Invisibles. My discoveries about what makes them tick are the subject of my forthcoming book. But along the way I came to realize something else about Invisibles: They are a management challenge. Because they don’t crave recognition, they don’t spend time on self-promotion, so it’s easy to take them for granted. But fail to understand and give them what they do crave, and you will lose them, along with the tremendous value they deliver.What Does It Mean to Be an Invisible?

Many of the Invisibles I met with are at the top of their fields; some are in charge of complex operations and of scores, even hundreds, of workers; many are well remunerated. I wanted to know: How is it, in an age when seemingly everyone is aggressively self-promoting, when we’re told that in order to get ahead we must have a brand or a “platform,” that these people—consummate professionals all—are satisfied with anonymity? How can they have the confidence to do their demanding jobs and yet not the ego to want to be widely known for their work? Despite the diversity of their careers, I found that all Invisibles share certain traits, with three in particular at the core.

Ambivalence toward recognition. We all do work that is anonymous to some extent, but most of us strive for recognition. That is how we feed our sense of self-worth. Invisibles take a different approach. For them, any time spent courting praise or fame is time taken away from the important and interesting work at hand. In fact, their relationship with recognition is often the inverse of what most of us enjoy: The better they do their jobs, the more they disappear. It may only be when something goes wrong that they’re noticed at all.

I met up with Dennis Poon at the nearly completed Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China and the second tallest in the world. Poon is involved in three of the five tallest buildings under construction on the planet today. He is a director of a global engineering firm, and over the decades that he has worked in this sphere he has gained a reputation for excellence. Not surprisingly, he is well regarded and quite visible within his field. Critically, being an Invisible ultimately isn’t about the degree to which someone ends up being seen; it’s about motivation. And Poon, like all the other Invisibles I interviewed, maintains a deep ambivalence toward recognition.


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David Zweig is a writer and lecturer who lives in New York. His forthcoming book, on which this article builds, is Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion (Portfolio, June 2014).
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