The often invisible difference between working and pretending to work

How can you measure productivity you can’t see? When we try to evaluate whether someone is “killing it” in their role simply by hearing them mansplain their digital transformation strategy or their AI-powered journey of innovation, it’s hard to disentangle facts from fiction, competence from confidence, and talent from, well, BS.

The harder it is to decipher what someone is doing, the easier it is to fake it. Ironically, this means that the more you get paid for doing what you do—because...