The Apprentice Candidates Should Hang Together

Here we saw Evan Davies gamely fighting with a clunky script, a production full of gimmicks and the 10 minutes repetition that accompanies all factual programmes these days. But what he told us was amazing- Unilever created a washing machine powder called Persil Power even though their rivals told them it would destroy clothes; the British Motor Company produced their market leading car, the Mini, at a loss because they wanted to be cheaper than their rivals.

So, maybe the silly decisions of the would-be Apprentices are only par for the course when you’re trying to run a business. I’ve made a few of my own- what possessed me to think people would want to pay Your Life Your Style £12.95 for a mug just because it was made in England? All of us in business can learn from mistakes, it’s just that it’s more fun when the mistakes are made by other people.

The first Apprentice task was won by the girls, or Melody and her Chorus as Lord Sugar called them. (I think his love of puns makes Sugar so sweet.) The lesson from the boys’ failure could be ‘Don’t let an accountant run your business especially an accountant who is in denial about being an accountant.’ Certainly I’ve met plenty of accountants who think that, because they add the figures up, they make the company’s profits and, when given power, have no understanding of how to handle the people who actually make the profits.

I digress. The real lesson was that the boys didn’t have a plan. There’s an old business saying, ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Poor Performance’. Of course it can also be applied to the business of doing the weekly shop or organising a children’s birthday party.

In the second programme of the week, which involved designing and selling a smartphone app, the boys should have won but they made one mistake. Before embarking on a project, we business people usually do a SWOT analysis. This means considering the Strengths and Weaknesses of our product, then looking at the Opportunities to sell it and the external issues that might Threaten its success.

Unlike Lord Sugar, I don’t believe it was the weakness of the app or the copy that sunk them. In the first six hours, both of these were strong enough to ensure that their app was outselling the girls’ by three to one. The clinching factor appeared to be their failure to get the endorsement of a major website. They lost this Opportunity because they had not considered a Weakness in their app, namely its use of racial stereotypes. They had identified that it could be a problem, yet they didn’t have an adequate answer when the website boss made this criticism. The girls (the Threat) got the website endorsement and romped it, despite the majority of them having no confidence in the product and the project manager doing a terrible presentation.

What was also fascinating was the way the survival instinct kicked in once the boys lost. Team leader Leon could have stood firm and said, ‘We all backed each other and the product- and I still do.’ Then he could have chosen the two candidates who were genuinely weakest- the poor salesman and the one who hid at the back. Instead, he thought he saw the way the wind was blowing when Lord Sugar criticised Jim and so picked him to come back into the Boardroom. As Nick might say, ‘Oh dear.’ When Jim challenged the decision by saying he didn’t deserve this fate on the grounds that he had been prepared to stand up and be counted, Leon backed down. At that point, a true leader would have stood by his decision: ‘Yes, you stood up, and so did I. We have to accept that when we stand up, we get the rewards if things go well and the blame if they go wrong.’ That’s why I would have said, ‘Leon, you’re fired.’ The Apprentice perfectly illustrates that business, like life, is about collaboration. It’s a sad fact about human nature that, when our survival is threatened, many of us forget Benjamin Franklin’s 200 year old advice, ‘We must, indeed, all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.’

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