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 our wanting to believe that we are indispensable in our individual sphere of influence is the cold and stark truth that we are not."  This message sank in a few years later as I witnessed five successive years of downsizing, never the victim, but always aware that we were all expendable.  With each departure we adjusted, reminiscent of Robert Frost's words, "And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."  In Midwestern terms, we "made do" and carried on.

While we cannot really attain this desired state of indispensability, Roush offered three strategies for the next best thing, the illusion of indispensability.  He challenged us to become writers, and that was before blogs even existed.  Well before the demise of formal communications due to texting, quick e-mails, and tweets, Roush saw good writing as a distinguishing trait, a way to get noticed in a crowded sea of professionals.   His second strategy was to build a reputation as a creative problem solver, the "alternative" man or woman.  Become the one who sees things a little differently than the rest, again creating an impression, something for which one can be remembered, one looked to when the problems were particularly daunting for traditional wisdom.  Who doesn't want to be a Joseph (at least in the musical), the creative interpreter of dreams, i.e. problems?  Finally, Roush encouraged us to volunteer at work, looking for the odd job, the one-off opportunity.  It's yet another way to rise above the crowd, to show that no job is too menial or too hard.  It's saying "Yes" when others are saying nothing. 

After 28 years, I didn't remember all this about the article.  I recalled the title, Googled it, and purchased an electronic copy from a digital archive of obscure business texts.  It was a nice bit of nostalgia, reading the article again and trying to think back to my perspective so many years ago.  In hindsight, this article was one of the most formative of my professional development.  Those three concepts stuck with me for years (and I never forgot the title).  I sought to leverage my writing, be the creative problem solver, and be ready to say "Yes" in a variety of settings.  Within a large company like AT&T, getting noticed was 80% of the battle for advancement.  In a small company, these are just good skills that are needed to get the job done.  Dr. Roush didn't do so bad either.  Since 1998 he has been President of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Knowing that I always was and always will be dispensable sounds cold, but it also relieves the pressure of trying to achieve that unattainable state.  It also keeps the ego in check.  Striving for the illusion may sound deceptive to some, but when built on top of competence and trustworthiness, it really just increases one's value to the organization and hopefully the resulting recognition and enrichment.  The Marketing Department though teaches us that perception is reality; so if the illusion works, go with it.