Church of the Customer Blog
« The boss' freaky friday | Main | How the community generates buzz »
March 01, 2004
The boss' freaky friday
From the welcome-to-reality perspective comes a new reality television series: "Now Who's Boss?"
As this New York Times story explains, the show puts executives into their companies' front-line jobs and often finds the big-wigs are incomptent at basic tasks, not only regarding company processes and products, but also about customers.
In the California Pizza Kitchen episode, to be shown on March 29, Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield, the company's co-chief executives, blunder their way through a number of tasks at two of its restaurants in Southern California.
During a stint as a waiter, Mr. Flax fails to ask for proof of age when a young Japanese tourist orders a beer, forgets whether the restaurant serves Pepsi or Coke and is flummoxed when he has to take care of four tables at the same time.
Mr. Rosenfield also has problems. His tie becomes caught under several drinks on a tray while he is waiting tables. Working as a pizza maker, he struggles to shift the pies in a wood-fired oven, receiving a stern talking-to from a kitchen manager who insists that he remake several of his creations.
"The truth is, we would have been fired from every job we undertook," Mr. Flax said. "We were completely incompetent."
And after failing to sell a single product while working at a counter for [Estee Lauder's] Stila line, CEO Dan Brestle plans to add sales skills to the training program for new makeup artists.
Other blogs that reference The boss' freaky friday:
» Now Who's Boss? from CRM Mastery E-Journal
A post on the Church of the Customer weblog , The boss' freaky friday , notes that a new reality series with a business twist ( Now Who's Boss? ) is coming to The Learning Channel (TLC) beginning on March 8th at 10:00pm EST. [Read More]
Like most of the reality TV shows being introduced, this concept has been done before. There was a short PBS series called Back to the Floor - http://www.pbs.org/opb/backtothefloor/
Back to the Floor did include a few of the "Ha ha - the CEO has to wash the dishes" kind of spiteful moments that make hourly employees (and network TV viewers) happy. But for the most part they focused on the real business improvement ideas that trickled up. Hopefully the new TLC series will be as good.
Anything that reinforces the need for executive involvement directly with front-line employees and customers is certainly beneficial for multiple audiences. Here's to hoping this show, like A&E's "Airline," is courageous enough to teach us the good along with the not-so-good.
