After the Super Bowl last night I was anxious to watch the new CBS show “Undercover Boss”. It was hysterical, sad, eye opening. Everything I had expected.

But it also made me realize something unexpected — corporate executives today are ivory tower zombies.

Basically, the premise of the show is corporate bigwigs go out into their companies and pretend they’re just average working stiffs.

This allows them to see up close and personal what’s going on at the companies they run.

Larry O’Donnell, the president and chief operating officer of Waste Management, was the first big boss to go undercover. He seemed like one of those undead from “Night of the Living Dead” for most of the show, walking around with a dumb look on his face as he observed the inner workings of a company he runs but is clueless about.

Many of us think corporate titans sitting in an ivory tower is just a cliché, well, watch this show and you’ll realize it’s as true to life as it gets.

O’Donnell discovers that one of the women trash collectors, Janice, he accompanies on her route has to pee in a tin cup.

Why? O’Donnell realizes it was his own productivity demands he instituted throughout Waste Management that caused people like Janice to resort to such dehumanizing measures.

“It is my failure to not have thought about that,” he said.

To me, this was the key moment in the show. Why wouldn’t a smart guy like O’Donnell take into account what his edicts from on high would mean to the rank and file?

It’s pretty simple. He doesn’t get the rank and file. And I would guess this guy was never really a rank and file.

O’Donnell has been largely separated from the people who do the actual grunt work for the past few decades. He was general counsel for a large oilfield company in the early 1990s; a vice president, and a senior vice president and higher after that, joining Waste Management as general counsel and corporate secretary in 2000.

This is not a man who worked his way up at Waste Management, or any company I can see from his bio online. And he admits on the show he’s never been fired from a job in his life.

There in lies the problem folks.

Men like O’Donnell are the norm at most corporations today who often go from law school or business school into the top ranks of companies, bypassing the realities of what goes on every day at the firms they run.

Once upon a time, it was a badge of honor to work your way up the ranks at a company. But those types of managers are few and far between. Almost every CEO in my book “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office” had endless stories to tell about paying your dues.

Once CEO, Spencer Lee of Roto Rooter actually decided to pay his dues even though he didn’t have to:

After Spencer Lee got his MBA from the University of Chicago, he joined a holding company called Chemed in 1980. Soon after, the firm purchased Roto Rooter, which was family owned at the time. He decided to move over to the new acquisition because it was a smaller company with more room for advancement and ended up handling marketing and helping with acquisitions, reporting directly to the president. He was 26 years old at the time and working at the company’s headquarters in Cincinnati for about a year when he realized he didn’t really know the plumbing business. So decided to volunteer for a lower level job as assistant branch manager for Roto Rooter’s Boston office when the opportunity arose. “People were saying, ‘let me get this right, you went to a renowned business school and you’re going to work as a branch manager?’”, he recalls. Even his dad questioned his decision. But young and single, he went for it.
Once in Boston, the company embarked on a plan to get into the portable toilet business, and as assistant manager, Lee was put in charge of the initiative for his area, buying the portable toilets and renting them out. One weekend during his tenure there, the Tall Ships came to Boston, a yearly event, and he sold 80 toilets to the city for the event. Little did he know his success in selling the units would get so messy. “It was the weekend. We were short handed. So I ended up with a rag in my hand cleaning the inside of these toilets on a Saturday morning. I remember thinking, ‘is this what I went to school for?’”
He also chose to often go out with company technicians on their calls to residential homes, which he was not required to do. During these visits, he saw how the company’s employees unclogged drains and fixed overflowing toilets.
Lee came to realize, “It was the best career decision I ever made,” he says, having seen first hand what the front line employees face everyday. A lot of good things happened to Lee when he got to Boston because he was in the right place at the right time. The Boston branch turned out to be one of the most successful in the country, and that led to him being tapped as regional vice president in 1984, moving up from there.
“A lot of people take the easy way out today, and don’t want to get their hands dirty, but the only way to learn is from the bottom up,” he says.

Today, moving up in Corporate America means going from one corner office to another with a better view.

I can’t help but think that’s why we see the problems we do today in workplaces across the country.

O’Donnell was surprised one of his workers was doing the job of three employees and not getting paid for it. The poor, hardworking woman, Jaclyn, was also close to losing her dream house because she couldn’t afford it.

It’s nice the O’Donnell was moved by her story and ended up helping her, but this again shows how out of touch executives are.

There are many people like Jaclyn out there. Companies are cutting costs and doing more with fewer people.

Hello Mr. O’Donnell. How do you think this is happening?

It’s not that men like him are cold-hearted it turns out. They just may be ignorant.

Maybe the show should be renamed to reflect what it’s really about.

“Undercover Clueless Boss”