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Shocking?

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Jun 142009

With the change in broadcast date, and a busy week last week, I’m only now getting around to sitting down to write about the final of the Apprentice.

First off – and nobody is more surprised about this than me – after correctly predicting the final two, I also successfully predicted the winner as well. Not only that, Sir Alan went with the person I thought should win as well, in that he gave the £100,000 job to Yasmina, leaving Kate as runner up.

Having said that, it certainly wasn’t the show where the winner was clear all the way through, indeed at the beginning of the episode it was pretty clear that Kate had the advantage, and from her grin and the scowl on the face of Yasmina they both knew it.

The source of the grin and scowl was following on from the traditional final task team pick. Kate chose Ben, Debra, Kimberly and Rocky and Yasmina chose Howard, Lorraine, James and Phillip. Even before the task was revealed, I thought that the picks that Kate had made provided the stronger team, but then the task was revealed – put together a new brand of chocolates, complete with a marketing campaign including a TV advertisement. On the previous marketing task Kate had been complimented on the best overall campaign, and Kimberly had produced by far the best commercial. With that having been revealed it’s not surprising that Kate was confident.

As the two teams discussed ideas, things even more seemed to be swinging in the direction of Kate. Her team came up with the concept of having a three layer chocolate box, on layer aimed at men, the next layer at women, and the final layer to share. Over with Yasmina they decided initially to target men, but when they researched the market found that the idea wasn’t popular amongst their focus groups, and Yasmina took the brave decision to change direction, opting for shocking and radical flavours as a unique selling point. As the final presentation approached about the only noticeable hiccup over on team Kate when they had a last minute name change on the chocolates – the original name being considered more suitable for something in the feminine hygiene department than the chocolate aisle.

On team Yasmina they had problems with the flavours, thanks in part to the limited budget that Yasmina imposed, and also the need for shocking flavours. The TV advert was okay, but a bit cheesy, the main radical part being the very bold simple poster that the team came up with. Yasmina got increasingly nervous about the final presentation, and in what I’m sure was a moment of madness, trusted Phillip with the dancers.

Team Kate motored on with Kate herself confident and comfortable in making the presentation, and with chocolate flavours that everybody seemed to like.

The mistake that it seems cost Kate the job seemed like a minor one. Whereas Yasmina, much as she had with the sandwich task, kept everything to strict budget, Kate and the team went to Waitrose a high class food retailer, and then trusted Debra to pick flavours. Debra phoned and said that with her choice of flavours the costs would be high, and Kate effectively went with her decision, and pitched at absolutely the lowest price possible – which was still twice the price of the box that Yasmina produced.

In the boardroom Yasmina was pulled up on the problematic flavours, to which she responded that the flavours could be tweaked before market, but the basic brand identity and price point were sound. Over with Kate she had little answer when she was told that her box price had pitched her chocolates into a price point dominated by established brands, and one that a new name would have difficulty breaking into.

Of course, as we know, the final decision isn’t only on the final task. Both candidates work for Sir Alan for a period of time, and much as with some of the surprise decisions in previous years we can only assume that Yasmina fitted in better than Kate. Whatever had happened, it certainly seemed to be a difficult decision at the end, and whereas I though Yasmina was the better candidate, I really wouldn’t have minded were he to have chosen Kate as I thought she was a similarly strong candidate.

Here is Sir Alan explaining his choice after the event:

But here is the actual moment that Sir Alan got his next apprentice, and for once I’d predicted it right!

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Posted by Richard at 5:29 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Interview Technique

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Jun 032009

It comes up every year in the Apprentice at the interview stage. Every year without fail, the interviewers take up the references, they check out the CV’s, and as Yasmina discovered tonight, if you’ve got your own business they’ll pull a copy of the published company reports and accounts.

Perhaps the grilling that Lee McQueen got over the lies on his CV last year might have given a clue, but still we had candidates who tripped up over lies and untrue statements at the interview stage.

Lorraine managed to “accidentally” add twelve months to one of the jobs on her CV, whilst James confirmed his joker status with the answers he gave to the application form questions giving Claude Litner plenty of ammunition with which to take him to pieces. Debra hit problems with her choices of personal references, all of which described her as aggressive and a pain to work with – whilst she seemed to regard those as compliments the interviewers like I suspect most business people really weren’t impressed.

Yasmina probably had the biggest shock, and again it was Claude who pulled her up. On her application she had quoted various figures relating to the turnover and the profit of her restaurant, Mya Lacarte in Reading. Like any other company, the restaurant has to submit it’s annual accounts, and like any company these can be retrieved by anybody for a small fee, which is precisely what Claude had done. The problem for Yasmina was that her accounts did not say the same thing as her CV. As Claude dug further she certainly seemed thrown off balance, floundering over the difference between gross and net profit, and struggling to explain what turnover was. Luckily for her the other interviews went significantly better, indeed several of the other interviewers disagreed with the assessment Claude had made – a rare disagreement in a programme where there seemed to be broad agreement over the candidates amongst the interviewers.

I have to say that I’m quite chuffed that for once I my prediction last week was spot on, in that I thought the final two would be Kate and Yasmina.

James was first to go, although not because he was a joker - Sir Alan said that he thought James was much more of a corporate man than he was looking for. To be frank James appeared to have an absolutely abysmal time with the interviews, and could be seen visibly sweating by the end of it. The impression I got, especially having seen his CV picture was that he never expected to get this far, and crafted the application to ensure a place on the show as the joker.

Lorraine was next. Her disagreements with other candidates were highlighted, and again she said that she had found it difficult working in a team where other members are competing rather than cooperating. Sir Alan said that he didn’t think she was the right fit for his organisation.

Before making his next choice, Sir Alan told Kate that she was through. She seemed to have sailed through the interviews, the main criticism being that she was just too perfect, and questions over whether there was personality underneath. Certainly on the basis of the programme tonight I thought she was certain to be a finalist.

The third and final departure was someone I thought should have gone a lot earlier - Debra. We did finally get a bit of an insight as to why she has lasted so long in that Sir Alan has seen potential. However her attitude has always been a problem, and the general opinion seemed to be that over the ten weeks she had learned to give the right answers, but questions over whether she had actually learned to change her character. Whilst that might have been a sure fire route to the exit, there were questions over Yasmina as well.

Aside from the concerns Claude had raised, the real issue with Yasmina was why she wanted the job in the first place. Running her own business, the question raised by Sir Alan was as to why she wanted to give up that freedom to work for him. Sir Alan himself had batted down some of the concerns Claude had raised, but he asked Yasmina directly, and her answer, that she wanted some time to learn before she would again step out on her own seemed to swing it, and Debra was shown the door – but not without a request to “keep in touch”.

Having got my expected final, who is going to win? On paper Yasmina seems the stronger candidate. She has already proved herself as an entrepreneur in the real world, and has an unequalled record of having won all three of the tasks she project managed. Kate is good, but had some serious wobbles midway through when she failed to sell anything. However, based on some of the previous boardroom comments Sir Alan has made about wanting a risk taker, I think Yasmina is my tip for the winner. She gambled with strategy and won on her tasks, and in real life gambled with her mothers house in launching her restaurant. If a business talent who is willing to take risks is what he wants, Yasmina seems to fit the bill.

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Posted by Richard at 11:38 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

When the Chips are Down

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 272009

We found out in the opening of the Apprentice tonight that the shopping channel task is a favourite of Sir Alan – certainly I have to agree. The annual trips to Peterborough really do produce some amusing episodes, and often really shake things up. They also produce some surprises, this time being no exception.

The established Apprentice wisdom on this one seems to be that you need a mix of items in your choice of four – a couple of low price impulse purchases that you hope to shift in bulk, alongside a couple of higher price items of which you hope to shift a few but make a lot of money. The belief also is that the amateur apprentice candidates are never going to shift anything like the volume of a professional presenter. This time around, Howard, Kate and Lorraine ended up with precisely that traditional mix of products, whilst Yasmina took a bit more of a gamble and told Debra and James to go for four low price items – all coming in under £25.

Whilst it’s the sales figures that decide the task, the main entertainment in the programme is always the sometimes hide behind the sofa bad performances. There was nothing to quite match up to the infamous trampoline, but certainly this crop of candidates produced their fair share of laughs from the crew…

The most amusing pairing was Yasmina and James – not quite Richard and Judy…

Nor here…

In the end though, the task came down to chips, and this presentation:

Alongside the sales, the shopping channel involved gives Sir Alan an estimate of the expected sales of the selected items with experienced presenters. The deep fat fryer pitched here was, on paper, the biggest money-spinner. The benefits of the low amount of fat used to conventional frying is the big selling point, but here Howard and Lorraine get stuck talking about chips, and giving a woeful pitch. Indeed at one point Lorraine can even be heard saying that she wouldn’t give chips to her children. The result was woeful sales, much as to be expected. But then one of the surprises of the night – Debra managed to ditch her usual abrasive personality and as a result was within 5% of the expected sales of the professionals for her items,

As a result in the final tally, the low ticket price coupled with the stellar performance from Debra make the gamble by Yasmina pay off, and Howard, Kate and Lorraine get sent into the boardroom.

The boardroom is surprisingly refreshing. After a dissection of the task failure, which Howard blamed on Lorraine over the chips demo, and Lorraine blamed on Howard for rejecting the Pleo Robotic Dinosaur, the three were called back in and gave their own pitch about why they thought they should stay. Unlike previous weeks at this stage there wasn’t a whole load of negative campaigning, just the three of them saying why they should stay.

The final decision though will I’m sure have surprised and upset quite a few people. All the way through Howard has been the quiet, steady pair of hands, indeed in previous series this has proved to be a good tactic, but not this time around. Sir Alan said that he was looking for a bit of a risk taker in these challenging times (although some would argue that it is risk takers who have got the country into the current mess) and sends Howard on his way.

The favourite to go must have been Lorraine – but she seems to have a strong advocate in Nick which is maybe what swung it for her again this time around, plus the fact that she generally seems to be right – as Margaret has pointed out previously. Kate, despite a poor sales performance in comparison with Debra on the task this week has been far too good in most previous weeks to have made her a strong possibility to go.

So that leaves us with our final five – and from the preview of the show it looks like we are going to have them whittled down to two next week. They are a bit of an interesting bunch. Firstly we have James who has been described variously as a joker, and the village idiot, then we have Lorraine who has narrowly escaped being fired on a number of occasions – they are probably the surprise two for the final five. Then we have Kate who has been tipped as a potential winner from early on, but has failed to shine on a couple of key sales tasks. Alongside her we have Debra, who is the youngest of the final five and has shown herself to be decidedly vocal and a pain to work with on a number of occasions, but may have redeemed herself at the last minute with this weeks task. Finally we have Yasmina who does seem to have some qualities in common with Debra, but is a lot more personable. She has also very rarely been called into the boardroom – although that can sometimes be a disadvantage.

In terms of the final two, on the basis of previous episodes I’m going for Kate and Yasmina to make it through – my thought being that the improvement in Debra this week is not enough to counter the negatives from previous weeks. Having said that, the interviews can always be a bit of an eye opener – although last year proves it isn’t necessarily a show stopper for Sir Alan, the CV’s can always throw up a few nasty surprises, especially if the candidates have been bending the truth a little…

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Posted by Richard at 11:59 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Backing the Wrong Horse

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 202009

Even a scholarship to Sandhurst can’t save you when you back the wrong horse.

The show sales task on the Apprentice always comes down to product choice, and there are two distinct strategies. Either you play it fairly safe and go for two products that you think will sell, maybe going for one low price and one mid price, or alternatively you take one of your two product choices and take a major gamble on a high ticket item and hope it will sell. Last year it was wedding dresses and the gamble paid off, this time Debra and Ben bet the task on high ticket rocking horses, and spectacularly lost the bet.

The problem was that they had almost decided on their choice before they saw the product, indeed the two of them are shown saying as much in the car on the way to the meeting. As you can see here, Debra left team leader James little choice, and makes it really clear which product she wanted:

Coupled with James choice of another fairly specialist item – a birthing pool, Empire ended up taking a massive gamble.

Over on the other team, the products chosen were the pushchair and the head guard, the relatively high price pushchair being a harder sell, especially when Lorraine discovered another stall who was selling below the minimum price that the team had negotiated. However that pricing problem was counteracted by the relatively cheap impulse purchase on the head guard, which enabled Ignite to with the task.

But the choice wasn’t the only mistake. At the very end of the show, Debra had a potential sale, which stumbled on the fact that the team couldn’t agree to a discount. In the initial negotiation, both Debra and Ben were so besotted with the horses that they failed to negotiate, something Sir Alan picks up on and we see two of the boardroom liars get caught out again:

Probably the most entertaining part of the programme tonight was the boardroom – the response Sir Alan gives when Ben starts off on the scholarship to Sandhurst routine again is probably one of the best lines of the series, and you can see James, Debra and Margaret trying to keep a straight face afterwards. However, Sir Alan then follows it up with a line that probably should serve as a warning to any other Sandhurst people who try and impress him, when he mentions Paul from series three who tried to sell cheese from Makro to the French, and to cook a sausage on a baked-bean can. Of course the Sandhurst people will quite rightly say that these two are unrepresentative of the people they turn out, just as I’m sure lots of other places would try and disassociate themselves with some of the performances we see on the series.

When it came to the firing, we thought for an awful moment that James was going to go – certainly he looked close to tears at one point, but really it had to be between Debra and Ben. Looking back although Debra does have some real problems over her attitude, she does seem to have some modicum of ability. Ben has had a couple of successes, but repeatedly messed up whether it be steamrollering in poor ideas and ignoring specific instructions in task three, totally missing the point of the task in week six or totally failing to sell a thing in week seven. He was the youngest candidate, and boy did it show, a vastly inflated and hyped up ego, that wasn’t backed up with the talent.

So, finally the man who didn’t go to Sandhurst is show the door, although I’m sure many people would have been happy for Debra to be sent packing too, as she was more up for the gamble, and was the one that pushed James. But Ben it was, and he really wasn’t very happy…

Next week we have the treat of the annual TV shopping task – I wonder if they will be selling trampolines this time around? As always it looks like an opportunity for some spectacular car crash TV.

As we’re nearing the end, who might make it all the way? We’re going for a Kate against Yasmina final – looking at the others, Debra seems unable to reign in her attitude, Lorraine might be an outside choice but has an entrenched reputation for antagonising people to overturn. James has previously been described as the village idiot in the boardroom and is struggling to overturn his reputation as a joker with no real talent, and finally Howard seems very much to have been the quiet one who has kept under the radar but gets weeded out at the interview stage. Needless to say, I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong in a couple of weeks time – I always am…

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Posted by Richard at 11:41 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Selling Margate

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 142009

Sometimes Sir Alan fires people for the task, other times he goes for someone on his list of weak candidates. This week it was definitely a chance for him to get rid of a weak candidate – and he was faced with a choice of two letting the real guilty party off.

The task was to rebrand Margate, creating a poster campaign and leaflet, and then presenting the campaign firstly to industry experts, and then to the people of Margate.

Both teams split themselves with two putting the materials together back in London, and two on the ground in Margate gathering market research and taking the pictures for the campaign materials. To be honest it looked like Empire were doomed from the start. This was clearly a creative task, and Ignite had Yasmina and Kate, both of whom had done well in previous creative tasks – Empire appeared to be sorely lacking in creative talent. They had the double problem of having Debra who seemed to have decided that she was going to be in charge, and bulldozing her way through all opposition.

The teams went for clearly different angles. Ignite opted to sell Margate as a traditional family resort, highlighting activities for all the family, whereas Empire thought that repackaging the town as a LGTB was the way to go, with the notable exception of Mona who suggested a family theme similar to Ignite.

It’s fair to say that whilst the LGTB theme produced a number of cringe making moments – in particular Tanzanian born Mona totally mishandling a conversation with a pre-op male to female transsexual – neither idea was a turn off for the industry experts or the locals. Despite initial misgivings in conducting the market research Mona found that many locals were already aware of a small LGTB in the town.

Therefore it all came down to execution, and in team Empire, this was an ongoing battle as Howard repeatedly tried and failed to get Debra to produce what was needed. Sadly, much as happened last week, Debra bulldozed through his objections, producing posters that looked more like leaflets, and with a font choice that was appalling – not quite Comic Sans, but pretty close, and a whole look that Beth described as something her students might coble together rather than something for a professional marketing campaign. To cap it all off her time management went out of the window and she left too little time to finish the leaflet, resulting in large amounts of empty space, a mistake she further compounded by lying in the presentation and saying that it was a deliberate idea to include local business advertising – a ploy the industry experts saw through immediately.

Whilst there were issues with the Ignite campaign, it was streaks ahead of what Empire produced. The posters had a consistent design, and a clear message, the leaflet was finished, and the presentation was good. So it wasn’t a surprise at all when Ignite were declared the winner.

The boardroom call-back was clearly down to tactics. Had Debra brought back Howard, then the discussion would end up being about the disagreements over the posters and leaflets where she had continually and incorrectly overruled Howard. Instead she brought back Mona and James, both of whom are seen as weak candidates who have escaped the boardroom so far, even taking into account Mona coming out on top in the sales task last week.

I’m absolutely clear that on the basis of this task Debra was the main person to blame, she bulldozed all opposition and what was presented was her design, and it sucked, however she presented Sir Alan with Mona and James, one of whom has been pretty quiet over the weeks, and the other who was described by Sir Alan himself last week as a village idiot.

Here it was very much that Sir Alan was presented with one of the people who he didn’t think was the right fit, so he took the opportunity to get rid of her – definitely a lucky escape for Debra…

Of course if you want to see a professional re-branding, check out this effort to re-brand somewhere else:

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Posted by Richard at 12:08 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Product, Product, Product

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 062009

It never fails to amaze me how many Apprentice candidates seem to think they can sell ice to Eskimos, but fail to get the basics right in picking the right product, for the right customer. This week with Sir Alan having set up pitches with a high class designer store and a long established hardware store, one team pitched a two person dog lead and an expensive cross between a sleeping bag and a jump suit, and the other a cat playground that was just a painted cardboard box and a one sided bicycle pannier that almost everybody said would unbalance the bike. Of the four products, only the one sided bicycle pannier sold, and that was a small number to the designer store on looks alone.

What that did do though, is level the playing field. With four poor product choices, and minimal sales to the potential big prospects, it came down to a battle of the salespeople, a chance to find out who was all mouth, and who had the potential.

After some team swapping, and based on the previous bravado, Ignite were in a strong position, they had Kate who has been a strong candidate so far, with Phil and Ben neither of whom have been shy in telling everybody what strong candidates they are. They also had Lorraine who whilst she seriously rubs people up the wrong way at times has consistently been right, and Yasmina. Facing them were Debra who also talks up her talents in sales, but was on a final warning from last week, along with Howard who we’ve barely seen, Mona who badly mismanaged the first task and survived by the skin of her teeth, and James who Sir Alan described as the village idiot last week.

Unlike previous selling tasks, every candidate had their own individual order book, and all but three managed to sell, those three, well the problem was pretty apparent…

The double whammy here is that or weeks, Phil has been in conflict with Lorraine, and from the moment she put herself forward as project manager, you could see the general laid back attitude to the whole task, so confident that if they lost the task, as project manager Lorraine would be shown the door.

However as always, it comes down to the boardroom. Things kept coming back to the lack of orders, so Phil tries to highlight his previous success – the selling task last week where he made a loss but won by default, and ignored repeated suggestions from Lorraine that the rug was worth a lot more than he thought, and then Nick brought up Pants Man from the week before. Amazingly at this point, Sir Alan still seems to be wavering towards Lorraine, so she plays the relationship card and mentions that she believes the relationship between Phil and Kate has affected the task. At this point Kate defends herself, and just for good measure sticks the knife into Phil. With that, Phil is gone, and certainly in this house and I’m sure a good few others we’re mightily pleased he’s gone.

What follows now of course is the massive effort to rebuild a reputation, so on You’re Fired we had humble Phil who plays down his talents, agrees with the comments made about him and is even vaguely complimentary about Lorraine, something that continues in his exit interview.

That leaves one other of the trinity of failure this week, Ben (who got a scholarship to Sandhurst don’t you know). Had it not been for the whole Phil and Kate thing, he would almost certainly have been in the firing line. Despite all his comments about his sales ability he flopped totally, he was just lucky that he failed along with Phil and Kate, and thanks to that and the ongoing arguing between Phil and Lorraine, he could take a bit of a back seat. Had he been in the boardroom after his spectacular loss last week, and a singular inability to sell this week, it certainly would have been a difficult one for him to talk his way out of, in much the same way as Phil was a strong candidate to be shown the door once he was picked. The interesting battle of course would have been Phil and Ben – but it might well have been a battle where Lorraine went down in the crossfire…

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Posted by Richard at 11:43 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apprentice Rule One: Read the Instructions

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Apr 292009

There is a classic mistake that candidates on the Apprentice make, over and over again they fail to read the instructions, miss the giant sized hints that they get given, and mess up as a result.

In previous series, the shopping list task has been about making the most money possible, getting everything on the list whatever the cost, this time it was a bit different…

Rather than a list of items to buy, there was a list of items to sell. The similarity was that mixed in amongst the bric-a-brac were some gems to catch the teams out – valuable shoes, a first edition of Octopussy and the most valuable item of the lot, an Indian rug.

The other big difference was in the scoring. Quite often the the Apprentice seems to attract sales types who will do anything to get a deal, any deal, a favourite strategy being the last ditch sell off to clear stock. In a normal scoring task, where it is purely about total sales, that would probably have won the task, but not this time.

The teams were told right at the beginning, that the task was about valuation, so at the end of the task rather than being a loss, unsold items had a value, as did the items they sold. At the end of the task they totalled up the value of all the sales, along with the valuations of the unsold items, and compared this to the total of all the expert valuations. As a result selling any items at a loss cost the team – it would have been better not to sell them at all. It said so in the instruction dossier that neither team bothered to read properly, and as a result both came back with a loss.

Exhibit number one, team leader Phillip trying to sell a rug that he’s decided is worthless. Note also that his nemesis Lorraine who spent most of last week telling him his idea was pants, is also right this week… Luckily for her Margaret is very clear who has the right idea, and even christens her Cassandra (to a totally blank look from Sir Alan) in the boardroom. 

Things weren’t much better on the other side. Here Noorul has an accurate valuation, but team leader Ben steps in and closes the deal on a stunning loss. Amazingly in the boardroom Noorul tries to take credit for this deal even when others point the finger squarely at Ben.

So with both teams making a total mess of it, eventually it came down to who made the biggest mess, and thanks in part to some luck – in particular selling the skeleton for above valuation to a bloke in a pub – Phillip came back with the smallest loss. He didn’t get off scot free though, as Lorraine got complimented for being right, encouraged to speak up, and Phillip got chastised for ignoring her feelings about the rug. Surprisingly after last week Lorraine seems like she might go further than I thought. Certainly it would have made an interesting boardroom if those two had gone in, because of the clear support Lorraine was getting from the other side of the table.

I wasn’t too disappointed though, as what the win meant was that Ben was in the firing line, and in my eyes clear favourite to go. Of course for Ben that wouldn’t be a problem as he had been offered a scholarship to Sandhurst, which he didn’t take. However as he tells the camera frequently it gave him the ability to think under fire. Like this bold, clear decision making over who to bring back into the second stage of the boardroom…

The irony of his rationalising here, cut short by Sir Alan is that his strategy to bring in two consistently weak candidates paid off and despite his weak performance as task leader, Sir Alan takes the opportunity to fire Noorul on the basis of previous performances instead, leaving Ben and Debra to ride again.

The two of them don’t get off unscathed though. Debra goes into her whole Rottweiler routine again, but also verbally attacks Nick – earning a swift reprimand. Ben was also seen to be floundering around, and clearly irked Sir Alan, and short of some sort of Damascus Road experience I suspect both of their days are numbered. I’d have been happy to see any of them go, and really I thought Ben deserved to go, but as has been pointed out in what is an entertainment show, the least entertaining candidate of the three went. Certainly I do look forward to the opportunity to see Ben flounder around, consistently proving that he lacks the skills and experience to back up his rhetoric, and equally the chance to see Debra open her mouth and put her foot in it. Whilst both of them seem to be trying to outdo themselves in arrogant rhetoric, Debra perhaps seems to have slightly more to back it up…

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Posted by Richard at 11:50 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Pants

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Apr 222009

Some teams are just unmanageable. The divisions in Ignite that we saw last week came even more to the fore this week as Kimberly – an early favourite in some quarters to win – struggled to keep the all out war between bulldozer Philip and Lorraine in check. The problem was that the two of them came up with two lousy ideas. Although Philip bulldozed his idea over Lorraine, it is worth highlighting that her idea diverged from the project brief anyway in that it had multiple characters – the brief called for a single character – but with the two of them going for each other it just seemed to deadlock the rest of the team, rather than binning both ideas, they ended up running out of time and having to pick the least bad of the two, losing time and sanity in the process, and leaving them with no time for the vital box design.

The fundamental problem is that with this battle going on within the team, and continuing into subsequent days for someone who is about quiet, co-operative management, it is impossible to handle, and ends up being like a cancer eating away at the team. In the real world, you’d probably be able to work around such a conflict, but in the world of the Apprentice you’re doomed, and it really comes down to salvaging what you can from the task, and playing the boardroom right.

For the first part, salvaging the task, Kimberly seemed to play it right. After the catastrophe of the first day, she took control of the advert, and received a lot of praise for the result, she also seemed to be lining Philip up for the fall by letting him do the jingle. As an aside, Beth reckoned this sequence produced one of the best lines of the night, when the chap in the recording studio comments on how Philip sounds…

She then hands off the presentation to Mona, who makes an utter hash of it telling the client about the product rather than the campaign. However Lorraine starts to mess things up when it gets to the boardroom.

Within moments Lorraine is making her points, attacking Kimberly and distracting from Philip. At one point Sir Alan clearly points the finger at Philip, but taken by surprise by the turn around from Lorraine, Kimberly who has more than once in previous tasks protected her, ends up focusing some of the boardroom rhetoric there, instead of highlighting how Philip bulldozed any other ideas, and laying the blame squarely at his door. As a result it is Kimberly who takes the taxi ride, and Philip gets let off, despite the whole concept coming down to him. Really I think Kimberly was probably the only one worth keeping, and both Philip and Lorraine shown the exit.

Meanwhile, over on the other team, for once we had a great example of a well managed team, that pulled together. The initial idea was good, and although the advert was a classic example of a ropey Apprentice commercial, the team worked well together, and it was clear from pretty early on who was going to win. Certainly on this performance Kate has to be a favourite for overall winner, although the clips on You’re Fired showing her getting friendly with Philip does possibly count against her…

Next week though we do get a chance to mix things up again, with a new twist on the shopping list task. Rather than trying to buy a list of items for the best price, the teams are being given ten items to sell. As always with those tasks the devil is in the detail, and knowing your items is key. You can be certain that Sir Alan will have put some gotcha items in there, and I’m sure we’re going to see some of the candidates mess up spectacularly as a result.

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Posted by Richard at 11:40 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

I Don’t Do Costs

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Apr 152009

Sometimes the candidates on the Apprentice lose through multiple mistakes, sometimes it’s one catastrophic mistake. This week we had both, on the one side we had a poor leader, who struggled to guide his team, and produced a poor product, and struggled to sell his product. On the other side we had a popular leader, who produced a good product, sold well, but ended up making a catastrophic mistake, a mistake that produced a rare significant direct intervention in the task from Nick Hewer.

This was one of the clearest examples of a task that was lost rather than won. Had it not been for that mistake over costings, Noorul was a dead certainty to go. Having said that it was a close run thing in the boardroom, and really came down to Paula showing some integrity alongside Yasmina who turned on her friend to save her skin, and Ben who sadly failed to do quite enough to talk himself out of a job.

To be honest, I thought Ben had blown it for himself with the “I got a scholarship to Sandhurst� comment – he didn’t go by the way – but the point that swung it I think was Yasmina, had she agreed with Paula that Ben had been tasked with the costings too but had dodged his responsibilities, I think that would have changed the outcome. Unfortunately Yasmina turned on Paula and Sir Alan went with the majority decision amongst the boardroom candidates.

Sadly, Paula got the chop, and we’re left with Ben who is rapidly climbing my list of candidates to get rid of. Phil after going up a bit in my estimation last week, came right back down after he lost it with Kimberly primarily because she kept her cool and didn’t lose it with Noorul. Kimberly does seem to have the right attitude for business in real life, but whether she’ll survive against the likes of Phil and Ben remains to be seen.

Posted by Richard at 11:58 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Sir Alan Makes His Choice

Movies & TV, The Apprentice 2 Responses »
Jun 142008

I’m somewhat getting used to not agreeing with Sir Alan over the final winner of the Apprentice, indeed over the four runs of the competition so far I think I’ve only actually agreed with his choice once.

The grand finale this year pitted Alex and Helene against Lee and Claire, with Sir Alan arbitrarily deciding which team had won, and picking his apprentice from the two on the winning team.

The task involved producing a new fragrance for men, involving giving a sales pitch, and presenting advertising. Both teams made mistakes. Alex and Helene proved to not be able to work together, and largely lost a day deciding on a name. Thanks to their allocated designer, they got a stand out idea for a bottle (and it was interesting watching the boardroom exchanges with Alex trying not to admit that he was given the idea) that could be split into two, which then lead to a name for the product – Dual. Helene tasked with producing the fragrance managed to produce a near clone of the perfume she usually wore, again an embarrassing moment for her in the boardroom. However the task also gave them a fixed price point for the product, and with their fancy bottle, all the margins would be blown.

Things weren’t much better on the other side. In terms of a product, their market research (asking a bunch of plumbers) indicated that men wanted a more male oriented fragrance, so they very much targeted male stereotypes, opting for a near Bond themed launch and product, calling the perfume Roulette, and producing a Bond-esque advert set in a casino. The problem with this was that to the industry guests invited to the launch this seemed to be strongly encouraging gambling, and would be a difficult sell as the main purchasers of fragrances for men are actually women (buying as gifts), so the thought was that the advert and theme would be off-putting to the main purchasers. Scent wise the task fell to Claire, and people were less than impressed, in one case describing it as a seventies throwback.

The split of teams was pretty deliberate I think. Claire has previously shown herself to be strong at presenting, Lee by far the weakest of the final four. Putting the two of them together proved to be beneficial, as Claire was able to help Lee to produce a much better presentation.

In the boardroom, Sir Alan awarded the task win to Lee and Claire, the two candidates most people expected to be in the final anyway, ostensibly because the dual bottle design was too expensive. Then after that, he seemed to fairly swiftly opt for Lee as his apprentice.

To many people Claire was the stronger candidate, but in much the same way as he did last year, Sir Alan has opted for someone with a lot to learn, someone he can shape, rather than the much stronger candidate. Needless to say, much as with Kristina, who is doing rather well for herself, Claire may find that coming in as runner up gives you a much wider choice of opportunities.

However, whilst his choice was a surprise this year, the choice this year has generated more column inches because of the revelation last week that Lee had lied on his CV. When you saw a brief shot of the offending document last week what he had done is quoted the dates of the course, and then put a note underneath that he had not completed it, however when question further on it he didn’t immediately admit the length of time he was there, causing a definite problem when it transpired that the company had contacted the university. Sir Alan, when questioned on this in the You’re Hired following the announcement justified it by saying that everybody fibs on their CV’s, and then made a comment about the expense claims filed by Bordan Tkachuk, the interviewer who had found out about the lie. At this point the camera cut to a not very happy looking Bordan Tkachuk sat in the audience. The decision has also been criticised by other TV businessmen for the message it sends out about being untruthful on a CV – many stating that honesty is a key quality in business.

To some extent, the You’re Hired programmes afterwards proved to be more of a revelation than previously. One interesting point was that Alex very much blew it the week before in the boardroom because he attacked Lucinda. Sir Alan said when asked about why Alex wasn’t suitable said that by that point it was already clear that Lucinda wasn’t going to be picked, and it was unnecessary to do what he did, almost kicking somebody when they were down. Alex tried to justify his actions by pointing out that all the others agreed with him, but largely didn’t get very far with his justification. The programme also looked back at the clash between Helene and Lucinda, made all the more interesting by having Lucinda sat in the audience with the other candidates. Helene tried to defend herself by arguing that it was the pressure of the task and that things were sorted out later, saying that her and Lucinda were on more friendly terms – unfortunately Lucinda didn’t agree.

The other uncomfortable looking former candidate on the programme was Jenny Celerier who was pretty loud throughout the early part of the programme until Sir Alan came on and the infamous kosher Chicken incident came up, and the discussion moved to a discussion about Jenny Celerier and her boardroom tactics. Once again she was heavily criticised for the way she latched on to what Sir Alan was saying and manipulated the boardroom. Certainly of all the candidates this year she has come out by far the worst from the experience being shown bullying other candidates and quite blatantly telling lies to get on. Unfortunately whilst she got her marching orders, the fact that Sir Alan has been seen to let off and employ a liar does tend to lessen the impact. As the article goes on to state that one-in-four companies have rescinded job offers due to dishonest or accurate CV’s. Certainly in previous recruitment processes for technical roles we’ve almost dispensed with interviews before we give candidates a thorough technical test to confirm that they can actually do what they say on their CV – and a worryingly large number of them cannot.

Maybe then it is good news for Lee, but bad news for the rest of us who have to recruit somewhere other than a TV show.

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Posted by Richard at 4:11 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Interviewing the Apprentices

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Jun 072008

As previously, this past week we got two chances to find out a bit more about the remaining Apprentice candidates, firstly with a programme profiling each of the semi-finalists with contributions from friends and family, and secondly with the traditional tough interviews from friends and colleagues of Sir Alan.

Taking the family contributions first, it showed what a diverse background the candidates come from. Some like Alex have had a relatively privileged upbringing, being schooled privately, whilst Lee is the son of a milkman and is driven by wanting to achieve more than his parents did. There were also some troubled backgrounds, Lucinda for example refused to discuss her parents and they did not appear, whereas Helene grew up having to cope with an alcoholic mother.

There were one or two interesting insights from talking to the friends and family, for example Alex, despite his relatively quiet exterior is regarded as being an expert manipulator by his family. The biggest embarrassing comment from a parent has to go to Claire’s Mum who when asked about the fact that her daughter talked too much agreed, and then added that during her early life Claire seemed to scream continually, before almost instantly going over to talking non-stop! She also added that Claire’s technique for dealing with Sir Alan is very similar to how she handles her own father.

The other tit bits that came out included some hints about the candidates current jobs – only Lucinda is currently paid more than Sir Alan is offering – although from comments in the interviews later in the week, Claire is achieving more with her bonus, although her basic salary is below the rate that Sir Alan is offering.

Moving on to the interview show, as is quite often the case, it did turn out to be a bit of a text-book demonstration of things not to do in interviews or job applications. Lucinda committed the classic error of starting to waver over whether she wanted the job at all, and worse than that telling the other candidates. She also had a hard time being the candidate taking a pay cut, a move which for some of the interviewed is incomprehensible – why change jobs for less money! After having disrupted the previously stable working relationship between Lee and Lucinda since he swapped teams a couple of tasks back, Alex continued by bringing this up in the boardroom after the interviews, certainly a move that lost him some fans in the audience. It should be said that this was partly because Alex was on the back foot after the interviews anyway as he had taken a lot of heat for an apparently boring CV. His standard excuse for this has been that he is only twenty-four – the problem being that on this occasion he was being interviewed by people who had achieved significantly more at a younger age.

Alex and Lucinda came out relatively unscathed compared to Lee, who had a catalogue of interview disasters, all the more amazing considering that he has previously worked in recruitment. First off Paul Kemsley asked him to demonstrate his dinosaur impression, something he has done on the show before – this was a test, and what Lee was supposed to do was politely decline – unfortunately he didn’t, and was then on the back foot trying to justify why he had done it in an interview but wouldn’t do it in front of Sir Alan. Claude Litner then picked Lee up on some spelling errors on his typed CV – as he and probably the rest of us were wondering, why didn’t Lee either use a spell checker, or get somebody to proof read the thing. The biggest faux pas however was spotted by Bordan Tkachuk CEO of Viglen, who had checked up on the candidates CV claims, and had been suspicious by some of the attendance dates that Lee had submitted. After giving Lee a couple of opportunities to correct them, Bordan then presented Lee with a letter from Thames Valley University confirming that rather than attending for two years as Lee had claimed, he had only been there for four months. Amazingly, that didn’t get him sacked – a number of people who I’ve chatted to about the programme who have been involved in interviewing for roles have said that something like that almost instantly leaves you to question what else on the application is untrue, and when presented with other suitable candidates, generally means that the person who has lied is out. Considering the problems that Sir Alan later had whittling the candidates down to two, it is a massive surprise that Lee was allowed to stay.

This year, the interviews were changed slightly by the addition of Karen Brady, who had a rather different opinion of some of the candidates, in fact whilst others were expressing concern at Claire’s incessant talking, she went so far as to say that if Sir Alan didn’t offer Claire a job then she would. All of this contributed to a quite surprising conclusion, with Sir Alan being unwilling to reduce the numbers down to two. There were no massively stand-out candidates, each had good points and bad points, so in the end he sacked Lucinda – to be honest she probably would have gone a lot earlier had it not been for the fact she kept being on the winning team. Her doubts about her fit were probably accurate, certainly she probably wouldn’t be a good fit with Sir Alan, and since she is in a well paid job that she enjoys anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

Amongst the four that are left, I think probably the most obvious potential winner is Claire. She has grown considerably over the series, but the main negative point about her is the amount she talks. However she has been shown to be able to modify that behaviour in the later part of the series. Lee has seemed to be a generally good candidate, but the issues over his CV seem to be a big negative, equally Alex has good points, but for me he still doesn’t stand out. Helene is interesting in that she seems to have got this far by virtue of keeping a low profile. Certainly her profile has been low enough that Sir Alan doesn’t seem to feel he knows what she does. She is also from a very different background than the others, coming from a corporate rather than sales background. After the interviews there was some accusation that she was playing on the tough childhood and alcoholic mother, which I thought was rather unfair – certainly it hasn’t really been mentioned until now, and it’s more that it came up in the interviewing than anything else. Sticking my neck out I’d say that Claire will take the prize at the end, but as before I’m not going to be surprised if Sir Alan gives it to somebody else.

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Posted by Richard at 1:45 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Artistic Adverts

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 242008

atishu!I don’t know whether the producers of The Apprentice make a note when they are picking candidates, or whether there is some strange kind of symbiosis between getting on in business and being a frustrated actor or director, but whenever Sir Alan dusts down the advertising task there are always one or two candidates willing to step up to the mark with an attempt to showcase their movie making talents into thirty seconds, and missing the whole point of the task.

This time it was Raef and Michael, who having discovered a shared interest in amateur dramatics launched into scripting their advert before the team had even decided on a brand for their box of tissues – the choice of product for the advertising task this year. Fellow team members Claire and Helene were pretty well left to get on with designing the box, putting together the press advert and the final presentation, while Raef and Michael recruited Siân Lloyd for their advert and produced a beautifully shot fifty second drama to try to win the task. The problem? It had to be thirty seconds, so they cut the in-your-face product shot, and cut their start turn down to a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, leaving mainly a sequence with two child actors sharing a tissue, but without the product box in sight. Claire pulled together a slick presentation, and a nice tasteful box for their “i ♥ my tissuesâ€? line, almost in spite of the lack of leadership from Raef.

Over on the other team, Lucinda was having creative differences with Alex and Lee as they produced a garish bright yellow box covered in pictures of people sneezing, and a cheesy, not very well shot advert that blatantly placed the product in shot multiple times, and repeatedly mentioned the equally cheesy product name “atishu!�. The creative differences scuppered the presentation, with Lee seeming pretty embarrassed at the lousy performance he gave.

So when it came to the boardroom, Raef and co seemed a picture of confidence, the opposition had produced a lousy looking add and a garish product, and his team had put on a slick show. But they’d missed the vital point, however good the production values, the advert didn’t show the product. Subtle advertising is not what Sir Alan is about. He never wants artistry, he wants to shift merchandise, so it was Raef that was shown the door, like a number of other budding Apprentice directors before.

The moral for next years candidates – when Sir Alan hands you a video camera, don’t forget the purpose of the film…

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Posted by Richard at 12:05 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Great Escape

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 172008
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Watching The Apprentice this week, you sort of felt that Michael should be walking out of the boardroom to the strains of The Great Escape. Thanks to a classic demonstration of boardroom suicide from Sara, where as often happens to someone at this point in the series, she had just had enough and didn’t properly defend herself – and with the bullying she has been receiving in previous weeks I’m not surprised. After she put herself forward as the person who hadn’t sold anything (neither had Michael) Sir Alan ended up focusing in on her rather than picking up on the more obvious mistakes from Michael and Helene the group leader, both of whom were much more deserving of the chop than Sara.

Much as had occurred last week, Alpha put on a good demonstration of how it should be done. Lucinda took the project management reins and again produced a well organised and well executed result. It is interesting that despite her earlier difficulties she does seem to be able to manage even other candidates with which she has crossed swords without too much of a problem, and unlike some who can’t seem to put personal differences aside, manages to get good results from everybody. That’s not to say that they played it safe. The task was selling wedding dresses and accessories, and was this years task where the two teams were competing to sign up suppliers from a shared pool. Alpha took a big gamble by going for a recommendation from Raef that they go with the well known, but ultimately expensive designer. This had benefits in that when both teams went for the same wedding accessory supplier, the supplier chose them because of their choice of designer, however part way through the day it was looking increasingly like it was a gamble gone bad, as whilst Renaissance had sold several of their cheaper dresses, despite a lot of interest Alpha still hadn’t sold any. It turned out though that it was all a question of faith, as in the last hour or two many of the people who had expressed an interest earlier on came back to the stall having looked at the other options, ultimately deciding to put the money down on the expensive dress. Thanks to the high ticket prices they then easily surpassed Renaissance who although they sold a larger volume of dresses, were left thousands of pounds behind. Considering what Helene has said about how useless Lucinda is in previous tasks, it was poetic justice really.

Then came the boardroom. Looking back at the task, there had been a number of poor decisions. Over on Alpha, the team had split into two with one pair seeing all the dresses and making the dress choice, and the other seeing all the accessory suppliers and choosing those. Renaissance operated differently. Michael suggested and Helene accepted the idea that the groups should split geographically, so one group saw companies in south London, the other in central and North London. This meant that nobody saw all the dresses. Michael schmoozed his way through the meeting with the well known designer that Alpha chose, but ultimately said in the car that he didn’t like the dresses and didn’t push them as a good choice – as a result Helene went for the middle of the road supplier that she had seen. In the boardroom Michael changed his tune and said what a good choice the now winning dresses would have been, and saying that perhaps he should have pushed them more. Their accompanying product was wedding cakes, the sale of which fell to Michael and Sara, however as something whose purchase is not the sole preserve of the bride, they proved to be impossible to sell, resulting in both Michael and Sara resorting to a pretty hard sell by the end of the day, although Alex was heard to comment pretty early on that Michael was using his telesales techniques on face-to-face sales from pretty early on.

Bearing in mind that he was already on a warning from last week after the kosher Chicken debacle, it seemed that the boardroom choice was really between Michael for his hard sell and the geographical division of the team idea, or Helene, who as team leader hadn’t seemed overly in control. Once Sara had been despatched, hopes were raised that Michael might be following, but sadly not. He again, much to the surprise of the audience, and even of Sir Alan himself, managed to talk himself into having another crack at project management next week.

Is he going next week? He does seem to be another of this seasons Houdini candidates, thankfully they do often get weeded out at the interview stage which is coming up in a fortnight. Amongst the remaining candidates, there aren’t any clear front runners. Alex has lost his sparkle somewhat after being stuck on Renaissance as they have lost six out of the eight tasks. Lee seems to have started to come into his own, but the way he treated Sara earlier in the series still is a strong negative. Claire actually received praise this week, but has perhaps had rather too many visits to the boardroom to win. To my mind Lucinda is the definite left-field choice – although she had a lot of problems early on, where again she was bullied and set up for failure by other candidates, she has proved herself to be very good at managing a team, and putting people into roles that fit their skills. So if, as he often does, Sir Alan is after a good all rounder rather than a gold star salesperson, she may turn out to be the idea choice.

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Posted by Richard at 12:50 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Two Birds with One Stone

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
May 102008
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One of the things about the Apprentice is that every so often it does throw up a surprise in the boardroom. This week was one of those weeks.

I said last week, that the shopping list task is usually entertaining, and this time was no exception. As has been shown in previous years it is a good test as it not only requires candidates to be able to demonstrate an ability to drive a hard bargain, but also quite often requires a bit of planning to get the specific items that are on the list. The task was made doubly difficult this time around because the teams were sent to Marrakech, where not only would they have to contend with some of the best hagglers in the world, but they’d have the added challenge of working in a somewhat alien culture where the primary languages are Arabic and French.

The programme kicked off with a couple of team swaps, with Jennifer and Michael being transferred to Renaissance and Sara transferred to Alpha. Sometimes the transfers seem to merely be to balance out the numbers, other times there is some method – this time it seemed to be to separate Sara from Jenny after the unfair treatment Sara got last week, but there also seemed to be a definite tactic of putting some of the biggest personalities together.

One of the effects of putting those big personalities together, is that you also got a massive overdose of overconfident arrogance amongst the team – most of them had managed to scrape through a previous task – Jennifer (the self-proclaimed best salesperson in Europe) surviving after giving away exclusive rights, Jenny inexplicably not being called into the boardroom over the greetings card task, and Claire being this years boardroom regular. Alex and Michael have largely managed to keep their heads down, although Michael did get told off in the boardroom last week, and has certainly had his moments over the weeks. Anyway, Jennifer as team leader quickly decided to eschew any real planning, and instead decided to head into the city and wing it, whilst Alpha sat down and planned out what was needed.

Although Alpha pretty nearly blew it after spending literally hours going from shop to shop after an alarm clock, leaving them struggling to find a juicer, at the end of the day the planning, and in particular paying attention to detail is what won through. Alpha returned with a complete list and received no penalties.

Over on Renaissance things were very different. First off Claire continued being difficult to manage, totally messing up negotiations for Alex at one point, and not being quiet when she was asked to be, then the lack of attention to detail started to show. The picked up the wrong colour alarm clock – the list specifically asked for green. They also failed to get the right sort of tagines – the list mentioned a specific, high class brand. But perhaps the biggest error considering that one of the team, Michael, described himself as a ‘good little Jewish boy’ on his CV was that they failed to get a kosher chicken.

When you think about it, the kosher chicken was probably one of the hardest items considering that Morocco is an Islamic country, however with their planning, Alpha discovered that there is a Jewish quarter in Marrakech, so were fairly swiftly able to go there and get exactly the right item. Jenny and Michael however ended up resorting to getting a Muslim butcher to bless one of his chickens.

That wasn’t the worst of it though – one of the other items on the list was a pair of tennis racquets, that had to be strung in the shop, and both teams ended up at the same supplier at about the same time. Not content with just getting the items, Jenny and Michael proceeded to try and bribe the store to not supply the racquets to the other team.

As a result, it was a rather different boardroom – as a result Sir Alan initially had the entire team into the boardroom, and as he said, he could quite happily fire the lot of them. First off though he contented himself with firing Jenny. On previous occasions she has lied or misled in the boardroom, most notably being when she managed to shift blame for the washing task onto Shazia for going back to the house when Jenny herself had told her to do so. There have also been several occasions she has been seem bullying other candidates, Lucinda being a prime example. What had really riled Sir Alan though, if you saw this weeks Jonathan Ross show, is her escape from the boardroom last week, and her confidence that she could get rid of Sara – that perhaps explains why she went before any choices were made. Of course her fate wasn’t helped by the way her lies started to unravel in the cross-questioning in the boardroom. Initially she claimed that she didn’t know what kosher meant – then later on when she started to see things going against Michael she changed her line and seemed to be claiming that she did know but followed along with Michael – this resulted in Michael point blank accusing her of lying. Once she had gone, Alex was sent back to the house, and the remaining three, Jennifer, Claire and Michael faced the final boardroom meeting.

It did look for a while as if Michael was going to go, but ultimately Sir Alan seemed to let him off on the basis that it was youthful exuberance – as a result it was the classic default choice when there are lots of problems on a task, and Jennifer as the team leader got the boot.

One final note though, over on The Apprentice: You’re Fired, Adrian Chiles has not been looking forward to interviewing Jenny after her behaviour on the main programme. I don’t know whether she has had some sort of epiphany having seen herself on TV these past few weeks, or whether an agent has advised her to do so, but it was a very different Jenny Celerier who presented herself to the world on that programme. Her red hair was toned down, and gone too were the power dressing suits. She was also apologetic for her behaviour during the programme, and didn’t talk back when the celebrity panel including Michelle Mone gave her a similar dressing down for her behaviour to the one she gave to Katie Hopkins last year. There was a little bit of an attempt to justify her behaviour, but ultimately she seemed to accept it was wrong. So was she following a game plan during the programme? Or has the Apprentice really changed her – I guess only somebody who knew her before and after could truly say. Suffice to say that she is gone, and both Sara and Lucinda are still there, so perhaps there is a bit of justice in the boardroom after all.

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Posted by Richard at 10:36 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Apprentice Tactics

Movies & TV, The Apprentice 1 Response »
May 012008
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One of the difficult things to balance for participants in the Apprentice is the conflict between the fact that the tasks are performed as teams, but the competition is for a single winner. On the one hand you are expected to work as a team, whilst on the other you want to ensure that strong rival candidates are removed if you get the opportunity. However being seen to act against the best interests of the team can sometimes land you in hot water when it gets to the boardroom.

We’ve seen just those sorts of tactics already this season, with Lucinda being put in roles that she says she does not have the skills to do, and then later being blamed. It happened again this week when Kevin realised late on that he was rather out of his depth on the presentations that he had decided he would give, and looked to Claire and Jenny who basically left him to fail, when perhaps them taking over the presentation would have saved the team.

It was one of those episodes though when the groups seemed to be competing on how badly they could do. The task was to produce a greetings card for an event that didn’t currently have a card. One team opted for producing an “It’s Great to be Singleâ€? day, however the choice of February 13th as the day – a day when most card retailers are focused on Valentines Day proved to be a poor choice. The other team were very much steamrollered by Jenny who was keen to put forward an environmental theme. The flaw of course was that she was proposing to save the planet by wasting trees in the production of unnecessary cards. Ironically she even torpedoed one of her own groups presentations by saying in front of the buyer that she herself had reduced the number of greetings cards she was buying for environmental reasons.

When her team ended up in the boardroom she admitted it was her idea, and it was pretty clear that Sir Alan laid the blame at her door – Margaret even said at one point that the idea had been rail-roaded through (Margaret also produced one of the funniest moments of the series so far by her reaction to the victory cheers from the other team – not a very seemly display for the boardroom). However, despite the strong pointers from the other side of the table, Kevin decided not to bring Jenny into the boardroom.

The reason was interesting. More so than in previous series, the candidates this time around are quite blatantly ganging up on the quieter, perhaps weaker team members. There are one or two who take the lead in this, and usually the crowd mentality kicks in and most of the others follow, or remain silent. The tactic has worked before, notably being the week of the laundry task where Shazia was told to go back to the house by Jenny, the team leader, and then sacked because she left the laundry when Jenny blamed her in the boardroom for the failure in the task because she left and the washing got muddled. It’s that name again though – once again it was Jenny leading the attack. This week she proved she is bright enough to realise that she was a prime candidate to go having pushed the environmental idea, so she needed to find someone else. She focused in on Sara for not having contributed. As with previous efforts this was totally wrong – Sara had contributed through several ideas including cards for minority religious festivals which are currently ignored, and also an idea for cards for pet events too – both of which were buried under the march towards an environmental theme. She’d then worked with Kevin on the card designs whilst Jenny and the others took pictures. Sir Alan, Margaret and Nick were wise to this bullying and said so – they’d seen otherwise during the task. However, whilst he could have stuck up for Sara, Kevin instead stuck with the crowd and selected Sara and Claire to come into the boardroom. By failing to stand up to Jenny he effectively guarantees that he would be the one who would go – they weren’t going to fire Sara, and the decision to bring her in compounded with the rest of the task meant that it would have taken a miracle for him to survive.

Quite how long Jenny will last remains to be seen. Certainly if the “You’ve Been Firedâ€? audience is any indication the treatment of Sara – which continued when she returned to the house as Jenny and the other bullies in the group ganged up on her – the audience at home clearly feel she has been treated badly by the others. Only Raef stood up for her, certainly scoring a number of points, especially as some of the other guys showed a different, and decidedly unattractive side to their characters during the exchange. The main downside though of The Apprentice is that unlike other reality shows, the audience has no voice in the firing of candidates, instead we are largely reliant on Sir Alan, Margaret and Nick to spot the bad apples and deal with them. Of course you only need to look to last year to see that they can still be taken in…

Anyway, with Kevin gone, there was one last burst of Matt Lucas jokes, and on to next week, which is the perennial favourite, the shopping list task. The difference this year is that the teams are being sent to Marrakesh to haggle with some of the masters in cutting a deal. The task always provides for a good deal of entertainment, hopefully this year will be no different.

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Posted by Richard at 7:57 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apprentice x3

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Apr 252008

So last night we had a bit of an apprentice catch up. Having been away for a couple of weeks we had the last two weeks stored up, plus another episode going out last night.

First off we had the week three “Pub Grubâ€? task. The idea was that each team was given a pub, neither of which had offered food, and the teams had to set up and deliver a food service. For the first time this series Sir Alan picked the project managers – in the case of the boys picking Ian who having been brought up in a pub would reasonably be expected to have an advantage.

The first problem however was the distinct lack of cooking experience on either team. For the girls, project manager Sara took on the cooking duties, over with the boys, Kevin – a bank manager by profession – volunteered primarily because he ate at a lot of Italian restaurants, Italian being the chosen food style for the boys. Over with the girls, the chosen style was “Bollywoodâ€? where they basically ripped off the menu from the local Indian Takeaway. This perhaps highlights the most fundamental flaw for both teams – the over-ambitiousness of their menu. Neither team opted for traditional pub grub which probably would have been a lot easier to cook. Instead both teams struggled with the cooking, forgetting key ingredients and in the case of the girls totally failing to deliver any service at all during lunchtime.

The winners and losers eventually came down to costs. Whilst the boys spent a small fortune on professionally printed menu sheets and flyers, and bought their ingredients (and frozen pizza’s) from the local Tesco, the girls got all their printing for free in exchange for advertising on the tickets and menu sheets, and sourced their ingredients cheaply from local suppliers. The ticket idea was another deft move on the part of the girls – they sold tickets for the evening service at £5 per head offering a £5 discount on the food bill – since half of the fifty people who bought tickets failed to turn up that produced a significant boost in profits. Ultimately it was the boys that were up for the chop, and despite a valiant effort to blame Kevin in the kitchen – even lying to try and escape (Tip: Don’t put on your CV that you value honesty in business and then be filmed being totally dishonest) it was project manager Ian who took the taxi ride home.

The next episode sadly marked the demise of popular candidate Simon Smith. Through the preceding weeks he had shown himself to be one of the better organised and enthusiastic of the boys, always keen to turn his hand to anything. However, in the pub grub task he had attracted attention by trying to point out the problems within the team – in particular issues like setting the menu prices before costing out the meals – and then felt he had something to prove. When the task came up as running a photography stall in Bluewater, photography being an interest of his, against the reluctance of the other members of his team (now mixed around to avoid personality clashes) he put himself forward as team leader.

The reluctance to have Simon as leader translated into some of the strong people in his team – in particular Claire – making the management job all the more difficult. Since he was also acting as photographer, someone needed permanently on the stand, things became impossible. Since both teams also had problems with the technology – one weren’t able to correctly identify the pictures to be printed, and the other only managed to print out on normal A4 paper – his project management was highlighted as the weak link. Even a valiant effort by Claire to annoy Sir Alan in the boardroom (he threw her out of the room rather than the whole competition) failed to save loveable Simon. However if the audience reaction in the studio of The Apprentice: You’re Fired is anything to go by I’m sure he’ll have a good career in the media if he wants it.

That brings us to the ice cream making last night. Both teams were under the leadership of people on trial. On one side was Claire, who Sir Alan had thrown out of the boardroom the week before. The other side was led by Lucinda who had again been set up to fail the previous week when she had been put in charge of picture processing by Helene despite possessing no technical skill whatsoever. Lucinda proved to be a revelation though – after grumbling in the previous tasks that she was being put into roles that she did not have the skills for, she proved to be a good manager, quietly and efficiently planning the task, allocating roles and so on. Perhaps her only failing was that she stepped back from an idea to mix the production and sales teams on the second day to avoid a confrontation and bad feeling amongst the sales team.

Over on the other side it was chaos. Most of the work on the first day was done by the production team whilst Claire and the sales team disappeared off and failed to get many confirmed sales calls or ingredients that were needed in good time because they wasted a load of time sampling cider. They even failed to make it on time to their taste test, instead opting to pick two blokes at random from the local pub. So whilst Lucinda’s team were working through a list of confirmed appointments Claire and co ended up going door to door. That made it all the more frustrating when thanks to one big deal, Claire’s team put in a flukey and narrow win.

Whilst Sir Alan would have had a vast choice of potential sacking targets and reasons amongst Claire’s team, it was difficult to pin down a reason for the loss for Lucinda as they only lost by a small margin. Ultimately, when it was discovered that the sales team had achieved at least two sales by offering exclusivity deals without consulting either the project manager, nor the farmer whose produce the teams were selling it came down to being one of the two salespeople who offered the exclusive deals – the chosen victim being Lindi who was supposed to be in charge of the sales team so should have stopped Jenny (the self proclaimed best salesperson in Europe) when she first mentioned exclusivity, and certainly shouldn’t have subsequently agreed to a similar deal herself.

The boardroom debate though highlighted an interesting feature of the Apprentice. Jenny, the other one of the final three alongside Lindi and Lucinda, at one point put forward that she was the best candidate, and highlighted what a good salesperson he was. More often than not a large number of the contestants in the programme are vocal sales types who maintain they are the best candidate due to their sales volume. However, Sir Alan doesn’t ever seem to go for that. Certainly he likes people who can sell, but they need to posses other skills as well. Indeed if you look at last years winner, he definitely wasn’t the best salesperson, even in the final two.

Ironically because Lucinda seems to have proved herself to be a well organised manager, she could be much more of the kind of person that he goes for – although in her case she perhaps doesn’t stick up for herself as much as she should in the boardroom. We’ll have to see exactly the kind of person he is looking for this time around – certainly after this week it will be interesting to see how far she goes, as before I was expecting her to be gone pretty quickly.

So now we have got into the series a bit, who are the people who are starting to stand out? Interestingly at the moment it is Alex, someone all the ladies seem to love. Whilst I can’t really comment on his attractiveness he does seem to be finding his feet and is coming over as trustworthy and efficient, and without the level of antagonism that seems to surround certain of the other candidates. Having said that, there is still a lot to go – I totally failed to agree with the choice Sir Alan made last year, so I could be surprised again by the end of it this year too.

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Posted by Richard at 12:01 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Losing It in the Boardroom

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Apr 032008

Last night was perhaps the first time watching The Apprentice that I’ve thought Sir Alan has got it really wrong – and I wasn’t alone. The audience of The Apprentice: You’re Fired were almost unanimous with almost everybody disagreeing with Sir Alan’s decision, everybody at work thought it was the wrong decision. Having said that, the new series clearly has found it’s new villain…

So lets roll back to what actually happened. Adrian Chiles said on The Apprentice: You’re Fired that the boys and girls team had swapped in terms of their handling of the task, however I disagree, in actual fact the girls were really not that much worse than they were last week, it was really just that the boys last week messed up a lot more. This week they seemed to find their form, and in what seems to be usual for The Apprentice the boys team appeared to put aside their differences and work together, whilst the girls were fighting. Perhaps it says something about men and women and their attitudes in business, but the number of times early in the series where the girls team has degenerated into arguments is really quite telling.

Anyway, the task this week was to run an overnight laundry service. The boys had an ace in their hand thanks to Simon Smith who in a previous life in the army happened to run a laundry. Under the leadership of Raef the team seemed to work well and to be thinking – for example they priced their service by phoning laundry companies in the phone book. They also grabbed the irons in the contestants house in case they needed them later. The split was still apparent to some extent, but the team worked well in spite of it.

The girls were a different matter. Jenny Celerier put herself forward as project manager and quite quickly rubbed some of the team up the wrong way with her very direct and forceful style of management. That style obviously works in some environments – she wouldn’t have got as far as she has in the real world if it didn’t – but the test of being a project manager in The Apprentice is managing a pretty diverse bunch of people. Looking at my own work life the management style for a sales team is very different from if you’re managing a technical team of software developers. Ultimately it was in the management where it went wrong, however the sales aspect was pretty jaw droppingly bad as well. Whereas the boys team researched their prices, the girls just seemed to pluck a number out of thin air – £4.99 an item. They then took that price into a sales pitch with a hotel, who would usually expect to pay about £200 to have a batch of 1000 items, including sheets, pillowcases and so on – the girls pitched at nearly £5000 for the same job, and just looked blank when the amazed hotel manager queried the price.

As a result, the girls team had to go for door-to-door sales. One of the key important things when dealing with the door-to-door jobs at the laundry though was making sure things didn’t get mixed up. Shazia took responsibility for this coming up with a system that kept track. However when team leader Jenny turned up late on at the laundry with a load of extra jobs, the girls realised that they wouldn’t have time to finish the work before they ran out of time in the industrial unit, so Shazia suggested that they should use the ironing facilities back at the house. Jenny therefore took the decision to send Shazia back to sort out the irons, leaving the rest of the team to finish off the washing – however with Shazia gone, the rest of the girls messed up the system, and got the washing mixed up.

Things then went from bad to worse when back at the house they realised that the boys had all the irons, and then whilst Jenny was continuing her one woman vendetta against fellow team member Lucinda the team proceeded to mix things up even more as they struggled to get the washing all ironed.

Heading back out to return the washing, and realising that they’d stuffed up on pricing, the girls hit on another tactic to boost revenue – asking for tips – however all of that came to naught as their customer discovered that either washing was missing, or they’d been given other peoples items – indeed the team was even fined £50 because one persons shirts had disappeared altogether. Needless to say asking for tips went down like a lead balloon in the boardroom too.

Fundamentally, with so many faults in the management, it seemed obvious that Jenny the project manager would be the one to go. After the girls team again degenerated into arguments in the boardroom after being told they had lost, Jenny brought back in Lucinda and Shazia.

What followed was a classic demonstration as to how the entire show can be won or lost in the boardroom. Shazia had been the person who had managed to organise the system in the laundry, and had also had the idea to use the irons – the system had only gone wrong when team leader Jenny had sent her back and the remaining team members had messed up. However that’s not the picture Jenny painted, and with Shazia in it seemed total shock as to what was happening, and failing to defend herself, Sir Alan took the version that Jenny had told, and fired Shazia for abandoning her role and causing the shirts to be lost. There was no question that Jenny should have gone, of the three people sat in the board room she had the most responsibility, but because she was willing to personally attack her team mates, and they weren’t willing to defend themselves, she survived. Having said that, but surviving in such a dramatic way, Jenny has definitely ensured her position as the villain of this years series.

You can watch the whole sorry debacle again on iPlayer, with more clips and discussion on You’re Fired.

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Posted by Richard at 11:43 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

New Lambs to the Slaughter

Asides, Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Mar 262008

Tonight it’s back, a new selection of the cream of British business talent – probably with a few more Big Brother rejects thrown into the mix – are taking on the challenge of the Apprentice. BBC Breakfast gave us a bit of a preview, with Sir Alan saying that he’s not totally happy with the editing, and snippets of some of this years contestants. The two that stood out were someone who got a first class law degree, a distinction in his masters, and says he’s always a winner, and a woman who proclaims herself the best saleswoman in Europe – at least one of them will discover that they’re wrong. Sugar thinks this is the best year ever, so we have an enjoyable series of Wednesday nights to look forward to it seems.

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Posted by Richard at 10:55 am Tagged with: , , ,

Sport Relief Does The Apprentice

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Mar 152008
sport_relief_does_the_apprentice.jpg

It looks like the BBC have decided that a celebrity special of The Apprentice for charity is a good prelude to the series, as well as being a good money-spinner for the charities. In much the same way as the Comic Relief special last year, this years Sports Relief included a celebrity version of The Apprentice, following much the same format.

This time around the two teams of five celebrities, again split men and women, were given adjacent retail space in which they had to set up shops, invite guests, and make as much money as possible for the charity in a one-night-only sale at the shops. On paper, the women had by far the stronger team with two people with business experience – Jacqueline Gold, CEO of Ann Summers and Kirstie Allsopp, who alongside her TV work has been part of several property companies. On the other side, perhaps the only person with any business experience was Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun. Of course, as regular viewers will know, it’s not always the team with the strongest individuals or the relevant experience that does well.

One strong similarity between this and the previous Comic Relief special was how clearly it showed that the kind of person who becomes famous is more often than not really bad at working in a team. The men especially fell out fairly spectacularly, and effectively wasted the whole of the first day arguing after Kelvin MacKenzie refused to lead (he later stated that he thought his abrasive management style would be detrimental to the group) and Hardeep Singh Kohli put himself forward and then resigned after Kelvin MacKenzie made a pretty poor taste joke comparing his management style to Adolf Hitler. Following on from that, MP Lembit Öpik stepped in. It wasn’t all sweetness and light on the other team either. Jacqueline Gold was quickly appointed as leader due to her relevant experience, however her management style caused problems, especially for Kirstie Allsopp who objected to being micro-managed by Jacqueline. At one point she referred to Jacqueline as a control freak, and at another point just stormed out of the meeting.

The other big similarity this time around was the importance of contacts. The task effectively had two money making opportunities, the first being the sale of tickets, and the second being the selling of goods. The men lost out significantly to the women with regards to ticket sales by firstly failing to sell all their tickets, when the women sold them all, and also by not selling their tickets for as much money. The big star in ticket sales this time around was footballers wife and former singer Louise Redknapp who managed to sell several tickets at vastly inflated prices – including three to one contact for £100,000. The women also did well on their choice of merchandise, managing to get a good selection of quality items, including some notable support from Harrods. The men weren’t without support either. Although their merchandise wasn’t as upmarket as the other team, they did have a valuable contact in Bernie Ecclestone, the billionaire in charge of Formula One who generously offered to match all of their sales.

When it came to the boardroom, it was these contacts that became the key, whilst in terms of ticket sales the women were the clear winners, the effect of Bernie Ecclestone meant that the sales figures were a much closer affair – however in the final totalling up, it was the ticket sales that won it, and the women won the day.

In the board room, it was clear that Alan Sugar had some people he blamed for the loss. First up he gave Kelvin MacKenzie a real hard time for not stepping up to the mark as leader, but ultimately it was Hardeep Singh Kohli who got the boot – both for his destabilising effect on the group, and also because he took responsibility for the shop – including arguing with the rest of the team over the logo, and also for not charging for food – something the women did and made money on.

Of course being fired from the celebrity show doesn’t really mean anything, as there isn’t a next episode, and no big job at the end, so certainly there isn’t the tension. Certainly various of the celebrities treat it as a bit of a laugh. Having said that, it still is an entertaining curtain raiser to the new series, and in terms of the charity, it raised over £700,000 for Sports Relief.

If you missed any of the show, the sixty minute first episode, the boardroom show and the final episode where Hardeep gets fired are all still available on iPlayer.

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Posted by Richard at 6:56 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Send in the Dancing Girls

Movies & TV, The Apprentice No Responses »
Jun 142007
simon-during-presentation_358×265.jpg

In a choice which I’m sure surprised a lot of people, Sir Alan Sugar has named Simon Ambrose as the winner of series 3 of The Apprentice. Having described him two weeks ago as Teflon Simon, it was a result I was half expecting – from the fact that Sir Alan let him off back then strongly implied that he was one of the favoured candidates.

Even as he was making the decision it was clear he could see the relative merits of each candidate. He clearly recognised that Kristina was experienced, in fact pretty well what Sir Alan said he was looking for four weeks ago when he fired Ghazal. He even commented in the final boardroom that he was wondering whether he wanted to be the headmaster again. He disagreed with Simon’s assertion that he was a good leader, and yet in the end he decided to take the risk.

To be frank, even during the final task, Simon didn’t look like a winner. As in previous years the two finalists got a selection of the fired candidates to choose from. He ended up with a mixed bag with some volatile combinations. Alongside Tre he got Rory – fired in week 2 after spending the bulk of the task fighting with Tre, and Jadine who also proved to be volatile at times, rounding the group off was Lohit. Kristina’s team also had problems on paper in that alongside Naomi and Natalie had Paul with whom she had had a run in back in week 6, and Adam who went in week 7 and seemed to have issues with various of the other candidates.

The difference in what happened was marked. Whilst Tre and Rory were kicking off, and Rory was giving people no doubt that he was there to prove that he shouldn’t have been fired in week 2, over with Kristina although Adam was getting grumpy, Kristina kept him under control. Paul was being pragmatic and professional about the whole thing too. Kristina divided the team and allocated out tasks, whilst Simon and Tre went off leaving the rest of the team at a loss for what to do.

The main point of the task was to come up with a conceptual design for a building to replace the IBM Building on the South Bank in London. Both teams were given a firm of architects to work with their ideas, and both produced eye catching and radical designs. Both teams then had to present their concepts to an audience of property experts, and put on a presentation. This proved to be the biggest source of arguments between Rory and Tre as for some bizarre reason Rory decided that dancing girls would be a good addition. Quite why I don’t know, and I think the reason escaped the rest of the team too, but dancing girls they had. I have to say that when he came up with that I was rather disappointed that Rory got the push so early, as this particular wacky idea added to the entertainment tonight.

By the end of the task, having seen the presentations, Kristina seemed to have managed her team best, delivered a professional presentation and held it all together, whilst Simon’s team had come up with a presentation almost in spite of themselves. Based on the editing of the programme, even the directors thought Kristina had it all sewn up. Then he gives it to Simon…

On You’re Fired Kristina looked visibly upset, as did her son in the audience. Indeed some in the audience gave her a standing ovation when she came on, and the Telegraph and Mail report that some of the other candidates wanted to walk out in protest at the decision. Despite being shown the selection of Katie snipes from the series she declined to retaliate with any comments back, rising above the backbiting as she had throughout the entire series. Sir Alan was asked directly about Katie on the programme, and fell very much into line with what Michelle Mone had said, saying that having seen what she had said over the series he wouldn’t employ her, nor would anybody else. He then said that Katie had the skills to do the job and that she didn’t need to do what she had done for the attention – but then it was all about Project Katie for her.

Anyway, Simon as winner still looked shocked to have won. Of all the candidates, he was probably the ultimate Sir Alan fan – and this is most definitely living his dream.

Perhaps on reflection this was the best resolution for both of them. In terms of the on screen action, Simon will probably be best remembered for the infamous trampoline scene – perhaps not the best thing to take to a potential employer. On the other hand look at Kristina who has consistently proved that she is a safe pair of hands to take on a task – I’d be surprised if there aren’t even now a queue of top companies eager to snap up her up. Even if Sir Alan decided that he wanted Simon for the final job, for us like many of the viewers, Kristina was the one who truly won the competition, and proved herself to be the best of the candidates.

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Posted by Richard at 12:30 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
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