Visibility Is Currency. The Question Is What It Cost You.

“You think it's about doing good work. It's about being seen doing good work.”

That's Rishi, in Chapter One, over drinks. David tells him it sounds shallow.

“It's not shallow. It's a strategy. Visibility is currency.”

And when David says that isn't how he wants to lead, Rishi just smirks. “Then be ready to get outpaced.”

I have been told some version of this at almost every stage of my career.

Here is the part most leadership writing gets wrong about that conversation.

Rishi is right.

Not about everything. But about the thing he is actually claiming. Invisible good work does not get promoted. The quiet, excellent person who assumes the results will speak for themselves is not being principled — they are relying on someone else to do their advocacy, and that person is usually busy.

Every honest senior leader knows this. We have all watched the wrong person get the role.

So the advice to simply do good work and wait is not humility. It is a strategy that outsources your career to other people's attention spans.

But Rishi's story does not end where he thinks it does.

They Both Became Visible

What gets missed in that scene is that David does not choose invisibility.

A few pages later he is sitting in a quarterly town hall where leadership has presented mixed results and nobody wants to speak. And he stands up — not planning to — and asks about rising turnover, heavier workloads, and how the company intends to balance performance against people's wellbeing.

The book describes his voice trembling. Hands shaking. It is the kind of question nobody at his level usually asks, in front of the entire company, with leadership on the stage.

That is not quiet dignity. That is an extremely public act.

They both became visible. The difference is what they were visible for.

Rishi was visible for what he claimed.

David was visible for what he risked.

Why One Gets Believed

There is a piece of economics that explains this, and I wish someone had shown it to me at thirty.

In 1973 Michael Spence set out how people signal quality that an employer cannot directly observe. His conclusion was narrow and useful: a signal only carries information if it is expensive enough that someone without the underlying quality could not afford to fake it.

Not expensive in general. Expensive for the pretender specifically.

Which explains something you already do instinctively. A new title on a profile costs nothing to display, so it tells you almost nothing about the person. Speaking confidently in a room that already agrees with you costs nothing. Taking credit costs nothing — that is the entire problem with it.

Asking the question nobody wants asked, in the room where it is expensive, is very hard to fake.

What an Expensive Signal Looks Like on a Tuesday

None of this is abstract once you start noticing it.

It is owning a mistake out loud before anyone has traced it back to you.

It is volunteering for the problem nobody wants at the moment the room has gone quiet — and everyone present understands exactly what you have just taken on.

It is mentoring someone whose success will never be attributed to you.

It is standing between a junior colleague and a consequence you could easily have let them absorb.

It is telling someone senior something they do not want to hear, in the meeting, rather than in the corridor afterwards where it is safe.

Every one of those costs the person doing it something real, in the moment, in front of people. That is precisely why they are remembered — and why nobody has to be told about them afterwards.

Borrowed Reputation

There is a darker half to Rishi's method that the book gives one paragraph, and it is easy to read past.

His team makes a mistake. Rather than address it, he spins the narrative so that a newer colleague takes the fall.

“See? Crisis averted. Reputation intact.”

The worst kind of visibility is not self-promotion.

It is borrowed reputation — looking successful because somebody else absorbed the blame.

That is the real mechanism behind visibility that feels wrong to watch. It is not that the person is loud. It is that the cost of their standing sits on somebody else's account, usually someone with less power to object.

And it works. For a while. It works right up until someone checks.

The Two Kinds

The book puts the contrast in a line I still think is the sharpest in that chapter: one chased influence, the other cultivated it. One protected his image, the other protected his people.

The practical version is about durability.

Claimed standing needs continuous maintenance. It collapses the moment somebody with real information is in the room, and it leaves you quietly afraid of scrutiny.

Standing that was paid for does not need defending. The evidence is already settled. It survives you leaving the room, and it survives other people describing you when you are not there.

What Happened Next

After the town hall, the validation David wanted did not come from the murmurs or the “bold question” whispers in the corridor.

It came as an email from Sehgal. Short, almost minimal.

“Important question today. Keep asking the right ones.”

And then something more consequential, the very next day. His manager handed him a confidential report about missed milestones and an imminent client escalation, and told him to handle it.

That is the part worth noticing.

Visibility that costs you something does not get you applause. It gets you handed weight.

Which is, in the end, the only currency that compounds.

The Test

I would not tell anyone to stop caring about being seen. Rishi was right that it matters, and pretending otherwise is a luxury usually available to people who are already visible.

But there is one question worth putting to your own visibility, and it is uncomfortable in about the right way.

When you were last seen doing something — what did it cost you at the moment you did it?

If the honest answer is nothing, the people whose opinion you actually want have probably already discounted it.

And if the answer is that it cost somebody else something —

that bill has not been settled. It has only been deferred.