It wasn't the revelation that Sir Alan Sugar sent his wife a birthday card bearing the message"Best wishes, Alan Sugar", or even that he thinks it reasonable to quiz female employees about their childcare arrangements that surprised me most about this week's BBC2 documentary The Real Sir Alan.
That moment came when we were reminded that the great Apprentice honcho was personally responsible for a business blunder so catastrophic it could potentially - in the opinion of his TV boardroom henchman and former PR adviser Nick Hewer - have cost Amstrad the chance to be a global computing giant on a par with IBM rather than little more than a satellite dish manufacturer for Sky.
In a moment of carelessness that would surely have resulted in the TV Sir Alan firing one of his Apprentices not just from the boardroom but out of an actual cannon, Sugar allowed a batch of hard drives to be installed into a new range of business computers – without bothering to check whether they worked (which, of course, they didn't). He eventually won damages from the supplier, but by then irreparable damage had already been done to Amstrad's reputation.
"What the bladdy 'ell did ya think ya were playing at?!" one can imagine Sugar shouting at himself in the mirror while jabbing his finger against the glass, over and over again. Still, at least he can now afford to smile about it (albeit with one of those strange, grimacing facial contortions that passes for an Alan Sugar smile).
It is a reminder, though – as if we needed one – how dependent most of us rank-and-file workers are on the competence of those at the top of the food chain. Time often makes those blunders appear more amusing, as in the case of the Decca records executive who in 1962 refused to sign the Beatles telling them "guitar music is on the way out." But you suspect, for example, that it may be quite a while before the public will feel quite so benignly to mistakes made by the likes of Sir Fred Goodwin, the erstwhile RBS boss whose over-reaching acquisition strategy has been blamed for jeopardising thousands of jobs.
Have you experienced a supreme act of senior managerial incompetence at first hand? And if so how did it affect you personally?
