The Illusion of Indispensability
I was talking with a colleague last week who stated that I don't miss a thing. I responded that in reality I do; I just make sure that I don't appear to miss anything. The comment made me recall an article from early in my career whose title stuck with me: Creating the Illusion of Indispensability by John Roush. The article appeared in a long lost (?) journal Business Horizons in their September-October 1984 edition. I was a 24 year-old Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. As a young, energetic Systems Engineer I would comb through a monthly circulated list of recently published articles, checking off the ones I wanted to read, looking for the secret of success. This one caught my eye. Roush, then Executive Assistant to the President of the University of Richmond, stated the dichotomy of our professional life, "All of us want to believe that we are important, really important....Juxtaposed against o...