(FORTUNE Magazine) – Not much of an actor? Flinch whenever you see a photograph of yourself? Have zero interest in your 15 minutes of fame? You still oughta be in pictures. You could be a star.

Then again, your entire work group oughta be in pictures. In fact, if a company cares about producing quality goods and services, it should also care about producing quality films. The focus of those films should be the firm itself. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a moving picture is easily worth 1,000 hours of management consulting.

Unfortunately, most business organizations misunderstand the potential of the cinematic medium. They're hot for finding their own little Leni Riefenstahls and Ridley Scotts to produce Triumph of the Will propaganda epics (albeit on a lower budget) or self-congratulatory 30-second advertisements (on a higher budget) colorfully celebrating their own wonderfulness. Many global firms--Texas Instruments, Merrill Lynch, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few--have proprietary satellite television networks to communicate with employees around the world. Egomaniacal Fearless Leaders can be blue-screened or chroma-keyed into charismatic performances. "We'll fix it in post!" has become a battle cry of corporate communications executives everywhere. The more sadistic companies remotely train, educate, and indoctrinate their employees by broadcasting or Web-posting videoclips that play like outtakes from America's Funniest Home Videos and Big Brother. The self-indulgence is staggering. So is the lost potential.

The opportunity has less to do with the power of persuasion and everything to do with exploring how people really perform in their work environments. Firms don't hesitate to use closed-circuit TV to monitor customer-service employees. But they rarely produce training films drawing upon this rich reservoir of in-house material. Authentic portrayals of the workplace, showing both stresses and best practices, would be inordinately valuable for management and employees alike.

This would hold equally true for a factory floor, a management retreat, a product-design session, a quality circle, or a suppliers' meeting. People in most organizations have not had the opportunity to see themselves interact with one another--let alone see how other people in the firm do their jobs. Recording these very human business processes as narratives could be both powerful and productive. For example, how do airline ticket agents informally cooperate during crunch time? Yes, there's the Heisenberg-type principle that says observation affects behavior, but the novelty wears off over time.

There's nothing inherently new in this: In the early 1900s efficiency experts such as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth used photography to record how people moved when they worked. The French, notably Etienne-Jules Marey, were particularly inventive in the early use of stop-action photography to study human movement. Similarly, ethnographers have used film and photography to capture the behavior of remote tribes around the world, as part of the academic field known as visual anthropology. In the workplace this discipline could provide opportunities to explore the intersection between culture and productivity--a place thick with innovation. Plus, it would give anthropology Ph.D.s a lucrative alternative to academia: They could produce tightly edited "workumentaries" examining a business process that top managers deem important. Perhaps they could examine top management itself.

Then again, big-budget propagandizing is probably a more comforting task for the top brass than appreciating intimate authenticity. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's marine in A Few Good Men: You say you want the cinema verite? You can't handle the cinema verite! Do organizations really want to see what goes on at work? Would they ever want their key clients, suppliers, or competitors to learn how prices get set, or what employees really think of the boss?

The economics are on the side of the more daring firms willing to sit through the cold, harsh truth. Production costs have plummeted over the years, and the visual literacy of workers has increased. Most employees would probably rather watch a well-made video then read a well-written report. What could be more compelling than a workumentary about themselves? After all, it's no accident that cheaply produced--but cleverly edited--reality TV shows have captivated viewers worldwide. That's a market force that shouldn't be ignored; it should be appropriated. Ready for your close-up?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. Reach him at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.