The characteristic function for a contraction is a classical complete unitary invariant devised by Sz.-Nagy and Foiaş. Just as a contraction is related to the Szegö kernel $k_S(z,w)={(1-zw̅)}^{-1}$ for |z|,|w| < 1, by means of $(1/k_S)(T,T*)\ge 0$, we consider an arbitrary open connected domain Ω in ℂⁿ, a complete Pick kernel k on Ω and a tuple T = (T₁, ..., Tₙ) of commuting bounded operators on a complex separable Hilbert space ℋ such that (1/k)(T,T*) ≥ 0. For a complete Pick kernel the 1/k functional calculus makes sense in a beautiful...