The Self-Proclaimed High Performers

I. The Word

The German language has a word that lies by telling the truth. You just have to look closely.

"Leistungsträger." Literally: achievement-carrier. The word sounds like burden, like responsibility, like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. It sounds like people who carry what others cannot carry. It sounds like the foundation upon which everything rests.

But the word says something different from what it means. A Leistungsträger is, taken literally, someone who carries achievement. Not someone who produces achievement. Not someone who creates achievement. But someone who moves it from one place to another. A carrier. A messenger. A haulier.

And that is precisely what he is: the self-proclaimed high performer takes the finished achievement of another — the engineer, the inventor, the creative mind — and carries it onwards: to the customer, the investor, the board, the market. In doing so he changes nothing about the achievement. He adds nothing. He improves nothing. He carries. And at the end of the journey, when the achievement has arrived, he stands there and says: "I did that."

The German language has exposed him. But nobody reads closely any more.

II. The Anatomy of Carrying

The achievement-carrier possesses a specific ability that distinguishes him from the person who produces the achievement: he can look upwards and downwards simultaneously.

Downwards he looks to see who has produced something useful. He recognises it — one must grant him that — with remarkable reliability. He has an instinct for which achievement can be sold, which invention has a market, which idea will convince a decision-maker. He is no fool. In his way, he is even brilliant.

Upwards he looks to see who wants the achievement. He knows the language of the superiors, their expectations, their fears, their vanities. He knows how to translate a technical innovation into a PowerPoint slide that a board member understands. He knows how to turn an engineering achievement into a "strategic initiative" that looks good in a quarterly report. He knows how to say "I" when he means "we" — and "we" when he means "I".

What he cannot do is what lies in between: produce the achievement itself. He cannot invent. He cannot engineer. He cannot solve the problem from whose solution he lives. He always needs someone below him who does the work and someone above him who buys it. Without both, he is nothing. But with both, he is everything — for he stands in the middle, and in the middle is where the money flows.

III. The Confusion

The confusion between carrying and achieving is no accident. It is the result of a systematic revaluation that is so deeply embedded in modern corporate culture that it passes for natural.

In the logic of the enterprise, the most valuable person is the one who brings in revenue. Not the one who makes the product. Not the one who designs the machine. Not the one who has the idea. But the one who secures the customer's signature. The manager who closes the deal. The sales director who meets the quarterly plan. The CEO who seals the handshake at dinner with the customer's board.

That this handshake is only possible because a hundred engineers worked for a year on a product good enough to be sold — this vanishes in the chain of causation. The engineer is a cost factor. The high performer is a revenue generator. In the language of the balance sheet, one is an expense and the other is income. And everyone knows on whose side the bonuses lie.

Thus the confusion arises: the carrier becomes the achiever because the enterprise values him so. And the achiever becomes the cost factor because he does not speak the language of money.

IV. The Career of the Carrier

The achievement-carrier rises. That is his nature, his talent, his life's purpose. He rises because he understands the system in which advancement is organised: the hierarchy.

The hierarchy rewards not creation but visibility. Not depth of knowledge but breadth of contacts. Not the quality of work but the quality of presentation. The engineer who solves a problem does so in the silence of the laboratory. The achievement-carrier who conveys the solution upwards does so in the visibility of the conference room. He presents where the engineer constructs. He negotiates where the engineer calculates. He represents where the engineer works.

With each promotion, the achievement-carrier moves further from the actual achievement. As a team leader he still knew the technical details. As a department head he still knew the project names. As a division director he still knew the budgets. As a board member he knows only the numbers — and the names of the other board members with whom he plays golf at the industry association.

Distance from the work is not a disadvantage. It is a prerequisite. For whoever is too close to the work cannot "think strategically" — which is the euphemism for no longer knowing how the work is done, but knowing very well how to talk about it.

V. The Three-Step of Appropriation

The achievement-carrier lives by a three-step as old as the division of labour: someone creates something. He takes it. He passes it on. The margin in between is the content of his life.

In industry the three-step goes: the inventor develops a process. The achievement-carrier writes it into a proposal, a presentation, a strategy paper. The decision-maker approves, finances, orders. The achievement-carrier collects the commission, the promotion, the bonus — and the inventor receives, if he is lucky, a mention on slide 37.

In academia the three-step goes: the doctoral candidate conducts the experiments. The professor presents them at the conference. The funding bodies renew the chair. The professor is cited. The doctoral candidate is given a permanent contract — or not.

In politics the three-step goes: the civil servant writes the analysis. The minister presents it. The public praises the minister. The civil servant writes the next analysis.

In consulting the three-step goes: the junior consultant devises the solution. The partner presents it to the client. The client pays 3,000 euros per day. The junior earns 80,000 a year. The partner earns a million.

The pattern is always the same. Only the costumes change.

VI. Oppenheimer's Middlemen

Franz Oppenheimer distinguished between the economic and the political means of acquisition. The self-proclaimed achievement-carrier operates with a third means that Oppenheimer did not separately name but that lies within his logic: the means of intermediation.

Intermediation is in itself neither economic nor political. It is a service — the transport of a thing from A to B. The haulier who transports goods performs an economic service. The interpreter who mediates between two languages performs an economic service. Even the manager who translates a technical solution into a business decision performs — initially — an economic service.

Intermediation tips into the political means when three conditions are met. First, when the intermediary becomes indispensable — not because his translation is so complex, but because he has monopolised the relationship to both sides. The engineer is not permitted to speak directly to the board. The inventor is not permitted to negotiate directly with the investor. The middleman has positioned himself between the two and lets no one pass.

Second, when the compensation for intermediation permanently exceeds the compensation for creation. When the manager earns more than the engineer whose work he carries upwards — not occasionally, but systematically, structurally, as a rule.

Third, when the intermediary begins to present himself as the originator of the achievement. When he says "I" in the board presentation when he means "the engineer on my team". When he says "we developed" in the client meeting when he means "someone else developed it, and I showed it to you".

All three conditions are, in modern corporate culture, not the exception but the norm.

VII. The Language of Appropriation

The achievement-carrier has developed a language of his own to make the act of carrying appear as an act of achieving. This language has by now become so ubiquitous that it has turned invisible.

He says "I led the project" and means: others did the work, and I watched. He says "I won the client" and means: I presented the solution that someone else devised. He says "I am responsible for strategy" and means: I decide which other people's ideas I pass upwards and which I do not. He says "my team" and means: the people whose achievements I present as my own.

The possessive pronouns are the key. "My project." "My results." "My division." The language of possession conceals the direction of value creation. For in reality, the achievement-carrier belongs to the project — not the project to the achievement-carrier. Without the engineers who build the product, he would be a man with an empty briefcase. But the language presents it the other way round: without him the project would be leaderless, directionless, lost.

This is perhaps the most refined form of appropriation: not to take the thing itself, but to take over the narrative. Whoever controls the story controls the perception. And whoever controls the perception controls the distribution.

VIII. The Pyramid of Carriers

What is truly remarkable is that achievement-carriers do not operate alone. They form pyramids.

At the base sits the engineer who produces the achievement. Above him sits the team leader who carries the achievement to the department head. Above him sits the department head who carries it to the division director. Above him sits the division director who carries it to the board. Above him sits the board member who carries it to the supervisory board. Each level takes something from the achievement — not materially, but narratively: it stamps the achievement with its own name, its own signature, its own "strategic framing".

By the time the achievement arrives at the top, it has five owners, of whom four contributed nothing to it. But all four have profited from it — through visibility, through attribution, through the fiction that they had "been responsible" for it.

The engineer at the base knows this mechanism. He has been watching it for years. He sees how his work migrates upwards, changing its sender along the way. He sees how his name disappears on the way up and is replaced by other names. He sees how the bonus for his solution lands in someone else's account.

And he stays silent. Because he knows that protest in a hierarchy counts not as courage but as a lack of team spirit.

IX. The Societal Dimension

If the self-proclaimed achievement-carriers operated only in individual companies, the problem would be annoying but contained. But they operate systemically — and their effect reaches far beyond the balance sheets of individual firms.

In an economy that awards its best salaries, its highest bonuses, its greatest status symbols to those who carry achievement rather than produce it, something happens to the incentives. The brightest of a generation study not mechanical engineering but business administration. Not because business is harder — it is generally easier — but because business promises the shorter path to money. The path leads not via the workbench but via the presentation. Not via the laboratory but via the network. Not via invention but via intermediation.

The result has been visible in Germany for thirty years: an economy that invents less and less and administers more and more. Fewer and fewer patents and more and more consultants. Fewer and fewer engineers and more and more controllers. Fewer and fewer toolmakers and more and more project managers. The achievement-carriers have displaced the achievers — not through force, but through the simple law of compensation: whoever is paid more attracts more.

This is not the lament of a cultural pessimist. It is a description of the mechanism that has led a country that once held "Made in Germany" as a seal of quality to increasingly no longer know how to make things — but to know very well how to talk about them.

X. What Oppenheimer Would Say

Franz Oppenheimer would have recognised the self-proclaimed achievement-carrier instantly. He would have identified him as a variant of what he called the "political state": a class of people who live from the productive labour of others without being productive themselves — and who secure this way of life through institutional structures.

The achievement-carrier is the political state in miniature. He produces nothing. He invents nothing. He builds nothing. But he controls access — upwards, to the money, to the decision-maker. And he has created structures that monopolise this access: the hierarchy, the reporting line, the "proper channels", the rule that the engineer must not speak directly to the customer.

Oppenheimer's solution was the removal of monopolies. Applied to the achievement-carrier, this would mean: flat hierarchies that exist not only in mission statements but in compensation structures. Direct connections between those who produce the achievement and those who need it — without middlemen who take a percentage and swap names. Compensation models that reward creation, not transport.

Until that happens, the self-proclaimed high performers will continue to carry. Not the burden they claim to carry. But other people's achievements — for their own benefit, on the way up, always further up, until at the very top there is no one left who knows how the work at the bottom is done.

Then it falls silent.