Dispensable = Indespensable

Seth Godin riffs on being indispensable, and says:

If Jeff Jarvis quit, though, all his readers and clients would notice. Immediately. He's indispensable.

...

Five years later, it seems to have sort of snuck up on us. Now, there are tens of thousands of people out there where being "that" person is the career, is the business, is the next job. Not just micropreneurs and freelancers... but employees and experts and programmers as well.

This is a factual statement that takes no position, so I will. A successful organization requires people that are masters at becoming dispensable to succeed. Supposedly, those huge salaries and bonuses are paying for the future benefit to the organization that the person provides. The only way to provide future benefit is by being dispensable.

Since Jeff Jarvis's organization requires Jeff to be successful, he has created nothing that lives past himself. He has not built an organization. He has built a job that will stick to him and hold him back for the rest of a lifetime.

Take on the other hand the Entrepreneurial Master Michael Gerber of E-Myth fame. Gerber has taken his ideas and turned them into a world-class organization that will fulfill his vision well beyond his lifetime.

Indispensable = Handcuffs

Therefore the only truly valid way to become indispensable is to be the master at moving into a role, then making the role so airtight that you're dispensable. You'll do nothing but move up. On the other hand, business models based solely on you do not scale very well.