Executives should go experience their business from the bottom up

I have a bit of a confession to make… I am NOT a fan of reality TV.

Shocking, I know.  But my take on the whole reality TV thing is this: the two reasons that reality TV is proliferating are  1) because people’s lives are so unfulfilled that they love to see people worse off than themselves and  2) there is almost no creativity, imagination or talent left in Hollywood.

That latter point can be readily seen in the fact that so many old TV programs and movies are being remade.  While some of the remakes are decent enough, the fact that they were remade at all just screams to me that the Hollywood writers have run out of ideas and think no one will remember the originals and, if they do, they’re too old to matter to the demographics anyway.

But I digress.

Despite my dislike for the reality genre, I had heard enough ads for the program “Undercover Boss” that I was intrigued.  I thought it might be interesting to see some high-level execs get put in their places by the everyday Joes and Josephines in their companies.

My interest in this concept comes from my frustration.  After all, anyone following the whole economic collapse, govt. bailout idiocy, and growth of Big Brother over the last several months can’t help but want to run screaming into the streets over the continued hand-outs of bonuses in the large corporations and on Wall Street.  This is the root of my own frustration.  But you may ask, what has one got to do with the other?

It is my belief that one reason so many large companies and corporations and yes, dare I say it, POLITICIANS, have screwed up so monumentally yet continue to get bonuses despite their big, giant F*** Ups is that these individuals are ridiculously out of touch.  They’ve been in the ivory and glass towers for too long and don’t know what real life is all about.  THEY should have to go to the bottom position and work in the trenches and see just how much their out-of-touch decisions impact the worker bees.

So now you see the reason that I wanted to watch this “Undercover Boss” program.  And yes, I do realize that I fell right into the same mental position that leads the rest of the world to watch these types of programs.

Anyhoo, it was a truly inspiring program.  The president and COO of Waste Management, Larry O’Donnell, went undercover and worked several blue-collar jobs within the company.  He actually realized how the policies that he himself implemented worked for and against the company and its workers.  The experiences also helped motivate him to change a number of policies for the good of the everybody.  Ovation please!

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to see this really successful guy take on the less-than-glamorous jobs within his company, get handed a lesson or two, and come out the other side a wiser man for the experience.  Could it have been a really good snow job?  Sure.  It is TV after all.  But I prefer to think that it was pretty genuine.

So now that I’ve seen this program, I’m thinking that all of those career politicians, Wall Street/Financial Industry mucky-mucks, and corporate execs that received govt. bailout money for their corporations should be yanked – kicking and screaming if necessary – out of their big, cushy office chairs and forced to worked along the ranks of the company underlings and everyday people to get a refresher course on real life and humanity.

The lessons they learn could change the course of the world as we know it.  The real question is, do any of them have courage enough to do it?  And sadly, I think that we all know the answer to that one is a big, fat ‘No’.