Tubby tyrant or a hunk ... who’d you choose to be your new boss?
You’ve heard the saying about ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, but suppose poultry really did get a democratic say in how we celebrate the festive season.
Bird-brains they might be, but no turkey is going to vote for plucking, basting and a fistful of Paxo. By a sweeping majority, the vegetarian option would win the ballot, and we’d all be eating nut roast next December 25.
That’s a daft notion, but no more stupid than what the Beeb was proposing in Who’s The Boss? (BBC2), a three-part documentary series that invites workforces to choose their own managers by popular vote — a process dubbed ‘collaborative hire’.
It’s an idea pinched from California’s Silicon valley, where the geeks of Google, Apple and Facebook assess and appoint new colleagues. The idea is that, if you’re going to be working alongside these recruits, you’ll want to select the best.
This is naive, arrogant and entirely devoid of any understanding about how normal people think — exactly what you’d expect of technology companies, most of whose staff haven’t made social contact with the real world since they were nine years old.
The truth is that nobody sane wants to bring in competition which is better qualified, or more efficient. That’s just asking to be made redundant.
every managing director knows this is how the workers think, from the team leaders down to the toilet cleaners. It’s human nature. That’s why we have bosses.
All the flaws and drawbacks were instantly apparent on Who’s The Boss? as the 900 staff at Reynolds’s fruit and veg suppliers in Hertfordshire were invited to select a new operations manager.
‘I’m picking whoever’s best-looking,’ declared one woman. everyone laughed, but she wasn’t joking. At least her method made some sort of sense: 15 per cent of people meet their partners at work. Why make yourself miserable by hiring plug-uglies?
one of the candidates, 48-year-old Andrew, immediately scuppered his chances of a job by declaring: ‘I’m a hard taskmaster.’ Across the company, where staff were watching his interview on monitors, an alarmed clucking went up, like turkeys who had just caught sight of the gravy browning.
Andrew’s rival was the chatty, extroverted Jill, who got all teary at the mere thought of being rejected. She won the job, of course: we weren’t told the exact result, but it was probably a landslide. What sort of brute would vote to make lovely, unthreatening Jill cry — especially when the alternative was tubby tyrant Andrew?
The fact that Andrew was far better qualified, with a lifetime of experience in similar jobs, was neither here nor there.
every other show on telly, from Strictly to X Factor to I’m A Celebrity, is subject to the public vote, the lowest common denominator. If the Beeb really thinks that’s how Britain’s businesses should be run, let’s see them start at New Broadcasting House.
They can copy the geeks, by getting rid of all job titles, for instance, and living off pizza. And then they can vote in the new director-general. That should be interesting.
A different sort of social experiment was unfolding in First Contact (C4), as Amazon tribes that had never ventured out of the jungle before emerged nervously into the wider world.
They jabbered and expostulated as they waded across the river to meet waiting anthropologists.
It seemed profound and exciting, until the subtitles appeared and we realised that what these Indians in their loincloths were actually saying was fuelled by frustration and greed: ‘I’ve always wanted clothes, but it’s really hard to get them off you!’
The tribesmen then went on a rampage, stealing food and tools, and life’s little essentials like plastic flip-flops. The scientists were in despair to see the disintegration of a hunter-gatherer culture that supposedly had remained unchanged since the Stone Age... 10,000 years of history, destroyed by a flip-flop.
However, this fascinating but scrappy programme, much of it filmed on out-of-focus on phones and cheap camcorders, concealed a major surprise. Far from being relics of a prehistoric era, the tribes turned out to be descendants of refugees who fled into the forests around 100 years ago, to escape the slave gangs on rubber plantations.
So much for the romance of the Lost World.