Twice in my life — in Denmark and Hong Kong — I have started chatting with women who ended up telling me about their bulimia, which they kept secret from almost everyone, including their friends. A few days ago, in San Francisco, I met a woman who works on water engineering projects for the U.N. “What I do in my job is connect people,” she told me. For example, she went to Haiti and brought the people who needed help together with the people (in Haiti) who could help them. She never tells her bosses what she does. To her bosses, the focus is on some sort of technology. Were she to tell her bosses what she does, she said, the focus would shift away from the technology. There would be attempts to institutionalize what she does — and institutions would be terrible at it.
What other jobs are like this (where your boss doesn’t know what you do)?
Shirley Hazzard’s Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973) is excellent. It’s Devil Wears Prada about a whole institution.