Are there no essentials?
Olga Nikitina: - I am of the opinion that there are no irreplaceable people. Of course, I appreciate the contribution to the development of the company of each employee, but if the circumstances are such that you have to part with someone, well, such is life, it all consists of losses and finds. After working for some time in the company, the new employee will understand the specifics of our work. And if we arrange each other, then over time it will become as "indispensable" as its predecessor.
But “fight” with “irreplaceable” is too strong a word. It is necessary to carry out systematic work, which is as follows: firstly, the manager himself must always be aware of what is happening in the company (what projects are being developed, what is being implemented at the moment, what has already been achieved, etc.). Secondly, try to teach employees to be versatile in their work, so that everyone can replace the other during vacation, illness, or due to workload. And, finally, thirdly, to regularly hold general meetings of the team, so that everyone knows where the company is heading, what to expect, how to build further work. Speaking not only as a business owner, but also as its manager, of course, I appreciate my importance in the development of the company. I believe that I am not only the founder of business, but also its thinking center, a generator of new ideas. In cases where the head of the company changes, the company can work worse or better (it all depends on the professionalism of the person), and when the owner changes, the company can cease to exist altogether or radically change its direction of activity. Combining both functions, I not only set a goal that the company must achieve, but also develop specific tools with which it must be achieved.
Vyacheslav Antonov:
For example, the work of a doctor is not mechanized, it simply cannot be. And I must say that there are very few good doctors. These are irreplaceable people, because if they are replaced, the quality of the service provided will suffer.
Tatyana Shvab:
The main thing is that a person understands his place in the business process. Each employee must know that he is responsible for his area of work. If he fills it up, the whole process will be slowed down. Transparency of technology is the key to successful work and lack of indispensability. There is a category of people who are trying to build technology in such a way that they become indispensable. But I do not welcome this and never do it, because, in my opinion, it speaks of a lack of self-esteem and low self-esteem. Life is so arranged that nothing lasts forever under the moon.
Everything flows, everything changes. Of course, I can be replaced overnight. I can be irreplaceable only thanks to my charisma, just like any other person.
Sergei Kudrin:
There are employees who silently do the job, and there are those who portray activity, while doing their best to exalt their merits “to the skies” and present themselves as such “irreplaceable”. I don't like such "irreplaceable" employees, I value highly qualified specialists more. Distinguishing one from the other is easy.
When a person works, you can see not him, but his work. Some projects, proposals constantly come from him, ready-made developments come. I really appreciate such people, because they do not waste my and their time in vain, but involve me only when it is really necessary.
And there are people who seem to be doing something, but the result is zero. But at the same time they come to me with enviable regularity, ask questions, consult. In general, they try to increase their importance in my eyes. But the work is still not going! I appreciate those who really work, I move forward and offer something myself, and I try to part with others as soon as possible. I think it will be better, both for the company and for the team.
I am a young CEO - less than a year in office. With the advent of the position had to change a lot in the company. Optimize business processes, identify really good specialists and those who were not interested in work, but only in their own status. As a result, many "irreplaceable" employees had to leave. After the departure of "irreplaceable" people, I did not immediately try to recruit new staff. I handed over the functionality of the former employee to specialists from related fields, looked at who was doing what. For some employees, the expansion of their functionality became an opportunity for career and professional growth, while others could not cope and left.
Compared to last year, Zebra Telecom's staff has been updated by almost 50%. Some positions have been restored and new invited specialists are working for them. In general, I believe that at that time the renewal of the company was necessary and it was successful.
Read the full text in the printed version of the Human Resources Management magazine
Probably, each of us has heard the phrase: "There are no irreplaceable people." The aphorism is quite common. Someone agrees with him, and someone can argue about this. Not everyone knows where this expression came from. Who first said it and why did it become so popular? We will try to deal with these and other questions in this article.
Who is the author of the phrase "There are no irreplaceable people"?
In Russia, the authorship of this expression is often attributed to I. V. Stalin. However, in fact, there are no sources that would confirm this fact. The only place where a phrase similar in meaning was heard was his report at the Congress of the CPSU. In it, he mentions "arrogant nobles" who consider themselves irreplaceable, and therefore feel their impunity. Stalin called for the deprivation of such people of their positions, despite all their past merits.
In fact, this expression became so widespread after the election campaign of Wilson, who ran for President of the United States in 1912. However, he was not its author. Wilson borrowed from French.
There are no irreplaceable people, but ...
In the middle of the last century, the famous Spanish artist Pablo Picasso uttered a phrase that echoes somewhere in meaning with ours. In his performance, it sounded like this: "There are no irreplaceable, but there are unique."
This expression is more to the liking of those who do not quite agree with the statement that there are no irreplaceable people. In the statement of the great artist, there is agreement that people are replaceable, but there are also such personalities who leave a trace forever and cannot be forgotten. Of course, the planet will not stop spinning with the departure of even the greatest of men. Life will go on, moreover, it will develop, new discoveries will be made. However, the achievements and labors of such people will never be forgotten, and the memory of them will be passed down through the centuries.
Who likes to use the phrase "Irreplaceable people do not exist"
This phrase is very fond of the authorities. If something does not suit an employee, with this phrase the boss can hint that there will be a replacement for the place of any employee. However, in our time, valuable personnel are worth their weight in gold, so specialists are very much appreciated. There are real people with tremendous experience, knowledge and skills. They are really hard to replace. Especially in such important areas as medicine, science, politics and so on. It happens that more than a dozen years will pass before a worthy replacement comes to the place of a gifted doctor, a great scientist or a talented leader.
Conclusion
There are no irreplaceable people. This is true, and not really. This is both good and bad at the same time. The truth is that, no matter how gifted, talented and great a person is, with his departure, life on the planet will not stop. Someone will still pick up the baton and carry it on. And this is good, otherwise the development of mankind would have stopped at some point. And the other side of the coin is that there are people who are still indispensable specifically for someone. With their departure, life loses its meaning, and in this case the phrase “there are no irreplaceable people” causes only bitterness and protest. People may appear in life who will fill in some gaps, but they will still take their place, but not the place of the departed.
Thus, this aphorism in the global sense probably makes sense. However, there are different situations in life, and, perhaps, this phrase will not be appropriate in all cases. Although it also depends on the person. There are people who do not have special attachments, and in their case the aphorism is whatever the circumstances in their lives.
Children of the 20th Congress, practically all of us were anti-Stalinists in our youth. And when, in the Brezhnev era, aged men hung portraits of Stalin on the windshields of their trucks and cars as a call for "order" and a protest against this "stagnation", I continued to be an anti-Stalinist.
After the 20th Congress, Stalin was buried so deeply by the "communists" that the understanding of "what Stalin is" did not come all at once and will be revealed for a long time...
Stalin did not say this:
“There is a person - there is a problem. No person - no problem
“The death of a man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”
“We don’t have irreplaceable people”
“There are no prisoners of war in the Red Army, there are only traitors and traitors to the Motherland”
“It doesn’t matter how they vote, it matters how they count”
There is a person - there is a problem. No person - no problem
This myth is used to point out Stalin's cruelty and disdain for human life. In fact, Stalin never said anything of the sort. This statement was invented by the writer A. Rybakov and attributed it to Stalin in his book "Children of the Arbat":
“In one of my articles, which he especially liked, I reproduced the well-known aphorism of Stalin: “There is a person - there is a problem. No person - no problem! Anatoly Naumovich glared: where did Stalin say this? In what work of yours? Or in a note? Or in what speech? I thought. He answered this way: knowing a little Stalin's psychology, I assume and even am sure that he never spoke such exact words in public. And he didn't write.
He was a great actor in politics and would not allow himself to reveal his essence. He could afford such frankness only in a very narrow circle of his "comrades-in-arms", or rather lackeys. Where did I read this? Yes, it's kind of blurry. Hanging in the air. A lot of where. In memoirs... In journalism. This phrase has become a kind of cliché for that era. So you don't remember exactly where? - Absolutely not. - So that's it, - Anatoly Naumovich exclaimed with youthful vivacity, - I invented it myself! For the first time in "Children of the Arbat" Stalin just utters this phrase. I composed - and put in the mouth of Stalin! I wrote this novel 20 years before it was published in 1987. And from there she went for a walk, and no one remembers where she came from.
“The death of a man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”
It is alleged that Stalin uttered the phrase: "The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." In fact, Stalin did not utter such words. This phrase is a slightly paraphrased quote from Remarque's novel "The Black Obelisk": "But, apparently, it always happens: the death of one person is death, and the death of two million is just a statistic."
“We don’t have irreplaceable people”
Stalin did not say anything of the sort. A phrase from Alexander Korneichuk's play "Front" (1942). Moreover, Korneichuk, a Ukrainian Soviet playwright and 5-time (!) laureate of the Stalin Prize in the field of art, was NOT the author of this aphorism himself either. He only translated into Russian the slogan of the French Revolution of 1789-94. The Commissioner of the Convention, Joseph Le Bon, responded with this phrase to a petition for clemency from an aristocrat.
In 1793, the Viscount de Gieselin, arrested for political unreliability, asked to spare his life, since his education and experience could still be useful to the Republic (as he thought). To which the Jacobin commissar replied: "There are no irreplaceable people in the Republic!" It is interesting that two years later, in 1795, other revolutionaries sent Commissar Le Bon himself to the guillotine. Well, there are no irreplaceable people!
“There are no prisoners of war in the Red Army, there are only traitors and traitors to the Motherland”
The famous phrase attributed to Stalin. Khavkin in his article “German prisoners of war in the USSR and Soviet prisoners of war in Germany. Formulation of the problem. Sources and Literature” quotes this phrase, referring to the Certificate of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions. What is interesting - there really is such a phrase, that is the name of one part of this certificate. No reference is made to where this phrase was taken from, where, when and to whom Stalin said this - is not given.
The most interesting thing is that there are no links in the help at all. Only in the introduction are the names of the archives in which they worked. There is a version that this phrase was allegedly uttered by Stalin in a conversation with a representative of the International Red Cross, Count Bernadotte, and is quoted in his memoirs. The phrase in the retellings is formulated as follows: “... there are no Russian prisoners of war - the Russian soldier fights to the death.
If he chooses captivity, then he is automatically excluded from the Russian community, ”which somewhat changes its meaning, because. "Russian community" is a moral category, not a legal one; “We will despise the prisoners, but return the prisoners to us and observe the conventions on prisoners of war.”
“It doesn’t matter how they vote, it matters how they count”
The author of the famous phrase is Napoleon III. He said it after another plebiscite in France. Tov. Stalin simply paraphrased them: "In bourgeois countries, it is important not how they vote, but how they count." First appeared in the memoirs of defector B. Bazhanov (to France, 1/1/1928) Full quotation “You know, comrades,” says Stalin, “what I think about this: I think that it doesn’t matter at all who and how will vote in the party; but what is extremely important is who and how will count the votes. However, it is extremely doubtful that Stalin would say this clearly compromising phrase in public.
US presidential candidate attributed to Stalin a false phrase about America
During a televised debate, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson quoted "words" from Joseph Stalin that he never actually said.
“Joseph Stalin said that if you want to destroy America, you need to destroy three things - our spiritual life, our patriotism and our morality,” Carson said.
Very quickly, viewers and netizens discovered that the presidential contender had given false words. After that, hundreds of ironic comments rained down on Carson.
It is curious that the quote cited by Ben Carson is well known to the Russian audience - it, but only in the reverse arrangement in relation to Russia, is cited either as part of the so-called "", or as a statement by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Some even attribute it to Otto von Bismarck.
The incident that happened to B. Carson is not so rare. Thanks to the Internet, the replication of loud statements and aphorisms of famous people who actually did not say anything like that has become massive.
The leader of the October Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, wrote about this: “The main problem with quotes on the Internet is that people immediately believe in their authenticity.”
On August 24-27, 1942, at the height of the battle for Stalingrad, Alexander Korneichuk's play The Front was published in four issues of Pravda. The main negative character here is not anyone, but the front commander Gorlov, the hero of the Civil War. The play ends with the removal of Gorlov from his post and the appointment of the young General Ognev in his place; At the same time, Gaidar, a member of the military council, remarks: “We do not have irreplaceable people. Many scared us, but they have long been resting in the garbage dump of history. And the party is strong as steel.” And then, on August 28, Pravda announced the removal of the hero of the Civil War Budyonny from the post of 1st Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR (i.e. Stalin) and the appointment of young General Zhukov in his place.
Since then, the phrase "We have no irreplaceable people" has come into use, and most often it is quoted as Stalinist. So it is, in essence, it is. Korneichuk's play was written by order of the leader and personally edited by him, including a line about irreplaceable people. And nine years earlier, at the First Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, Stalin attacked certain “arrogant nobles” who “think that they are irreplaceable and that they can violate the decisions of the governing bodies with impunity. What to do with such workers? They should not hesitate to be removed from their leading positions, regardless of their merits in the past” (speech on February 19, 1933).
However, Stalin knew one irreplaceable person. In 1952, after the start of the "doctors' case", he told his inner circle: "You are blind kittens, what will happen without me - the country will perish, because you cannot recognize enemies" (according to Khrushchev's report "On the cult of personality ...") .
Outside the borders of our fatherland, the phrase about irreplaceable people was known much earlier. The slogan "There is no indispensable man" was used by Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 US presidential election, and by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 election. This saying was born in France, and in the 19th century it was quoted in French even in England: "II n'ya pas d'homme necessaire."
The idea that anyone can be replaced was to the liking of the Jacobins. In the revolutionary year of 1793, Viscount Louis de Giselin began work on the development of coal mines in Boulogne, but was arrested as an unreliable aristocrat. From prison, the viscount turned to the Jacobin authorities with a request to release him in order to continue working for the good of the republic, which was in dire need of coal. To this petition, the Commissioner of the Convention, Joseph Lebon, replied: "There are no irreplaceable people in the republic."
“There are useful people, but not a single necessary one. Only the people are immortal, ”as if Maximilian Robespierre said to his friends in the spring of 1794, according to Alphonse de Lamartine's History of the Girondins. Well, just like Stalin: “Leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are immortal” (speech in the Kremlin on October 29, 1937).
However, the Jacobins were not the first to use the phrase about irreplaceable people. It appeared under the "old regime" and belonged to the Marquis Louis Antoine Caraccioli (1719-1803), a French writer and historian. In 1759, his book The Art of Being Satisfied with Oneself was published. Here, in chapter 42 (“On Politics”), it said: “There are no irreplaceable people; in politics, as in other occupations, habit and skill do most of the work.
Another version of this saying is known: "Cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people." In the early 1960s, it was quoted in France with reference to Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) and was directed against de Gaulle, convinced of his indispensability; later this saying was attributed to de Gaulle himself. And in a 2005 French collection of quotes, the phrase “Cemeteries are full of people who considered themselves irreplaceable” is given as an Arabic proverb.
In fact, she appeared in the memoirs of American General Omar Bradley, A Soldier's Story (1951): "In the army, we often laugh at the myth of irreplaceable people: we knew very well that Arlington Cemetery is full of irreplaceable people."
Finally, a few sayings
Once someone dropped a similar phrase, and everyone picked it up. They believed that people can be shuffled like cards, and nothing will change.
The sun will still blush, and the matter will be argued. The sun will definitely roll out and stick to the sky, but questions will definitely arise with the energy of a particular person. After all, no one and no one is able to repeat. There is a bakery at the back of my house. Tiny, with rustic violets on the windowsills and stacks of old magazines. It bakes croissants with whole apricots and pours cocoa into Czech porcelain. Returning from training, every time I run for a buckwheat baguette and talk with the saleswoman. She stands behind the counter in a white starched apron and resembles the "gray-haired old woman" from the fairy tale "The House That Jack Built". Always sterile, friendly with powdered hair at the roots.
Are there no irreplaceable people? Are you sure?
We bow to each other old-fashionedly and chat about this and that. I share that the husband taught the child to growl, and now she imagines herself to be either a lion cub or a puppy. She talks about her old dog Lola, who sings along with Leps.
A month ago, the woman quit her job and left for her son. Her place was taken by a sullen aunt with no hair and "the house that Jack built." Without a smile, soft energy, laid-back hospitality.
I still buy bread, but my life has lost the usual morning conversation.
In our student years, we chose a tiny restaurant located in the cellar. They roasted cordon bleu, made dumplings, poured draft beer and served the cheapest coffee in the city. They played "Hands up" and "tramp boy".
Things were sluggish, monotonous, until a new administrator appeared: a skinny choleric girl. She started hosting cocktail parties, changed the menu, arranged candles and invited musicians.
Two guitarists theatrically hung frock coats on the backs of high chairs and sang "Sunday" and "The Secret". On Fridays, the barista played pranks. On Mondays - tasting of new dishes.
Things went up sharply, and people began to book tables in advance, until the “administrator” got married and went on maternity leave.
The restaurant immediately deflated, returned to its former sluggish life, and then completely closed.
“There are no irreplaceable people,” said someone in France. This was repeated by Woodrow Wilson, followed by Stalin, and many of us continue to say so.
Similarly, Pliny the Elder, without checking, wrote that ostriches bury their heads in the sand, while they simply lay their necks on the ground to rest.
Similarly, we say that soup must be eaten every day, cactus saves from harmful radiation, and if a person grinds his teeth, then he has worms.
In fact, there is nothing useful in boiled vegetables, invisible radiation cannot be absorbed, and you can only replace the battery in the watch, and it’s not a fact that they will go on as before.
