NBC to Trump: "You're Fired!"

General Electric Company (NYSE: GE)'s NBC Universal did not include The Apprentice on its 2007/2008 schedule. But in true World Bank fashion, NBC Universal gave Donald Trump the last word -- letting him quit before NBC Universal publicly fired him.

The Apprentice debuted in 2004, averaging 21 million viewers and topped the new show ranking in its first season. But it steadily lost about two-thirds of its original audience by the time it completed its sixth installment in April 2007. I stopped watching it last year because it was too boring. And I think it jumped the shark when business schools starting using it as part of their curriculum.

During the late 1980s, Donald Trump invented the idea of using books to promote a real-estate business. During the latter part of the decade, he was all over the media -- but not to the same extent as he has been in the past few years. At the end of the 1980s, Trump went bankrupt, along with many other real-estate developers.

I see the demise of The Apprentice as the canary in the coal mine for this similarly debt-fueled decade.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He owns General Electric stock.