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tension decreases your ability to process information and make decisions. The social facilitation literature shows that the presence of others, by increasing motivation and psychological arousal, will enhance performance of overlearned and simple activities such as running or walking, but will decrease performance on tasks that entail new learning or involve novel or difficult activities. What tasks people have mastered varies depending on the person. But generally, simple repetitive motions such as those involved in assembly-line work benefit from the social facilitation effect, while tasks entailing complex intellectual work, such as analyzing complex and multifaceted information to make a decision, are harmed. The negative effect of observers on performance that is not completely routinized through repeated practice is why actors and other performers do so much rehearsing before they have to appear in public.

Another cost of visibility is distraction of effort. People are interested in their reputation and image. Consequently, they spend time on impression management. This need to spend time and other resources on image maintenance increases as public scrutiny increases. And time spent dealing with scrutiny and managing appearances is time that cannot be spent doing other aspects of one’s job.

To take the starkest example of how visibility diverts effort, consider the life of a CEO of a publicly traded company. One survey of American CEOs found that they spent 11 percent of their time on corporate governance and administration, which includes investor presentations and conferences, quarterly conference calls, and the like. To put that 11 percent in perspective, this amount of time was as much time as the CEOs reported spending on operations and more time than they spent on product development.5 A study of 79 CEOs in Japan, even with its less shareholder-obsessed culture, reported that they spent more time on investor relations than they spent on unions, employee training, and outsourcing issues combined.6

The distractions caused by the requirements for responding to the demands of visibility can cripple both individual and organizational performance. One biography of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman noted how the attention that came with winning the prize often made it impossible for the winners to continue the research work that brought them distinction in the first place:

Most scientists knew that not-so-amusing metalaw that the receipt of the Nobel Prize marks the end of one’s productive career…the fame and distinction tend to accelerate the waning of a scientist’s ability to give…creative work the time-intensive, fanatical attention that it often requires.7

The Wallace Company was the first small manufacturing organization to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which at one time was accompanied by a lot of press and public attention. The visits, press requests, and conferences proved so distracting that the company wound up filing for bankruptcy. An executive commented:

When you win the Baldrige, there is also an obligation, if not a contractual commitment, to go out and spread the gospel. You also have to open up your business to others who want to see your systems and procedures. That is good, but if you are in the business of trying to survive, it becomes a financial problem and defeats your original purpose of being in business.8

There is yet another cost of visibility. Under the pressure to “look good,” people and companies are reluctant to take risks or innovate, opting to do what seems safe. This may help to explain the “innovator’s dilemma,” described by Clayton Christensen.9 Christensen noted that once companies became large and successful, they seldom introduced the next generation of innovations in their industries, particularly when such innovations were disruptive to their existing business model. This reluctance to innovate occurred even though the large, dominant players typically had the intellectual and financial wherewithal to bring the new technologies to