In 1993, one of the Seniors in my fraternity got a job. It was the highest paying job in his class, and he was going to make a whopping $32,000 by delivering chips for Frito Lay.
This was '93, coming out of recession, so the college job market was not so hot, so that was good money back then (more than the Arthur Anderson hires were making), but the job itself was in a backwater of Kentucky. My fraternity brother was actually hired as a fast-track executive, but to start his job, he had to ride on chip-delivery trucks in the rural parts of Kentucky for nine months to "learn the ropes."
He hated it, pitching crackers over voicemail to delivery truck drivers and salespeople, so he left to go be a maitre'd in the nation's capitol. Frito Lay's loss, but better early then late.
These days, I don't know if that is still the way they hire, but a new way of training executives is taking over. The company takes highly paid executives and puts them on the line for several days at a time, re-familiarizing the brass with what life is like in the trenches for the hard-working middle-class.
The Wall Street Journal talks about these folks, and explains how today's management is taking a top-down approach to customer intelligence.
Ms. Kibler is a vice president of the nation's No. 2 dialysis-treatment operator, earning a comfortable six-figure salary while overseeing 48 other clinics. For three days this spring, however, she helped treat seriously ill patients alongside technicians working up to 13-hour days for an average of $14.30 an hour. "The job is definitely more physically demanding than I had imagined," the 48-year-old executive admits.
That's precisely the point, according to DaVita Chief Executive Kent J. Thiry, who created the immersion program for his senior managers in 2002. "The experience changes their view of the world," he says. "They are better leaders as a result."
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