Far be it for me, a man who once made a loss running the tombola stall in a village fête, to tell the world’s biggest retailer its business. Nevertheless it seems to me that Wal-Mart has got it wrong. Or rather, only half right. And then for the wrong reason.

A memo leaked last week reveals that the company is contemplating making everyone working in its stores do lowly physical tasks such as shelf-stacking or trolley-retrieving. As you might have guessed, Wal-Mart’s thinking is inspired less by concern for its employees’ health than by hard-nosed calculation. If the memo is to be believed, the company thinks that the ghastly prospect of a little exercise each day will deter couch-potatoes, skivers, wimps and fatties from applying for jobs. Thus the strategy will “drive out the lazy”, gradually increase the number of healthy people on its workforce, and so bring down the cost to the company of sick-days and healthcare.

That sounds logical, if brutal. The trouble is that in making only those working on the shop floor do the exercise, Wal-Mart could be accused of operating one law for its menials and quite another for its boardroom fat-cats. It isn’t only the checkout staff who should be sent out to retrieve trolleys from far corners of the car-park. It’s also the top execs. And not primarily because it would make them trimmer, but because it would instil two qualities that are often absent from the top of corporations and governments. Humility, and a sense of reality.

The Romans had the right idea. They had a feast called Saturnalia when masters became servants and vice versa. Of course the exchange of status was strictly limited. The servants weren’t permitted, for example, to feed their masters to the lions while they were in charge. Even so, it was an exercise that reminded the ruling class of what it was like to be bossed around. And although one hates to give the hierarchy of the Catholic Church any credit for humility or a sense of reality, much the same thing used to happen on the Feast of St Nicolas, December 6. For one topsy-turvy day the bishop would relegate himself to dusting the candlesticks, and the humblest altar boy would be elevated to the bishop’s throne. Of course, they would never elevate an altar girl; that would have been the end of Christendom as they knew it. Nevertheless, by their actions they were issuing a timely memo to themselves that Jesus washed his own disciples’ feet.

Well, we can all think of modern organisations where the bosses make a point of stooping to pick up litter, or occasionally getting coffee for their secretaries, or even manning the customer-complaints line now and then. But not many. And some of those bosses do it only if there are TV cameras or impressionable visitors. My feeling is that it should become standard practice, not least because it would make businesses more efficient. Imagine what would happen if the directors of British Airways had to man the check-in desks over a bank-holiday weekend. Wouldn’t we find that, miraculously, all BA flights were bang on schedule?

The main reason, however, is that many big decisions are made today by people who have virtually no contact with those whom their diktats will most affect. Nowhere is that more true than in politics. The Tories, for instance, are on the brink of electing a leader who has done nothing in his adult life except politics and “PR”. And I don’t single out the Boy Dave because he’s more insulated from the real world of work than other politicians, but because he isn’t. He’s par for the course. You would need to go back to the Stuarts to find a time when the country was run by people who had so little experience of the hard graft of ordinary life.

But the disease has spread well beyond Westminster. Schools are run by heads who haven’t taught for years; hospitals by administrators who never go within 50 yards of a patient; railways by management consultants who are chauffeured to work; and banks by millionaires who haven’t the faintest idea of what it feels like to be unable to pay off a £100 overdraft. They have all forgotten, if they ever knew in the first place, the nitty-gritty of their own business. Of course, that has always gone on, to some extent. “Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, and you all may be the Rulers of the Queen’s Navee,” W.S. Gilbert wrote, in sardonic response to the appointment of W. H. Smith as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1877. But now, I reckon, it’s everywhere.

Perhaps in our specialised world the old army maxim — lead by example — is no longer always possible or desirable. I wouldn’t actually want a management consultant driving my train; it would take him ten years and a £10 million report to decide whether to apply the brakes at Euston. But since the Blair buzzword of the week is “respect”, I think that those who wield power in 21st-century Britain might profitably ask themselves why, on the whole, they command so little of that precious commodity from the public. The answer is that they are so rarely seen at the coalface, shovel in hand.

I reckon Wal-Mart’s executives would learn more about themselves, their business and human nature from a day manning their own checkouts than from three years at business school. I wonder if any of them will be humble enough to give it a go.

Parent power isn't the answer

Talking of leaders being adrift from reality brings us to Blair’s new rescue-plan for schools, which seems to boil down to promising more power to parents. For heaven’s sake, man, get a grip! When it comes to failing schools, parents aren’t the solution. They are the problem. It’s because so many parents allow their kids to run riot at home and on the streets that teachers now find it impossible to instil any discipline in the classroom. Putting parents in charge of schools would be a little like putting cyclists in charge of traffic lights.

On the other hand, it would win votes by flattering the electorate. Thus is vital public policy decided in modern Britain.

Mind games

So MI5 claims that women have been put off applying for jobs in the secret service because BBC TV’s Spooks showed two women agents dying violently. Hmm. Shouldn’t our spymasters be grateful to be spared applications from people who clearly can’t tell the difference between the fantastical fiction of a TV drama series and reality? Or are such confused individuals rather useful for concocting, say, dossiers about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in countries that we plan to invade?

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