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The Apprentice Leave Their Brains In A Jar Outside Their Door

By jimsym on May 1, 2008 in Claire Young, Jennifer Celerier, Kevin Shaw, Raef Bjayal, Sir Alan Sugar, The Apprentice

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The Apprentice who has the strongest personality wins through to the later rounds more easily than those who don’t speak up. However, for stronger personality read “the ability to ride rough shod over anyone else.” Certainly Jenny is a major proponent of talking over people. And in this task she takes this skill to a new level.

The task is actually the easiest one that they’ve had. It was to go away and design a themed set of greeting cards for a specific day or days.

What could be simpler?

Kevin (I eat Italian I do) Shaw is promoted well past his level of competence to project manager for Renaissance and Michael is made project manager of Alpha.

So let’s look at what each team did to fulfil the brief, the result boardroom firing and whether the firing was fair. However, this time I’m going to split the review post into three and see how it goes.

Send A Card To Lecture Someone About Saving The Environment

Agent Orange (aka Jenny ) was well to the fore in this task and indicated she was highly creative by being able top come up with thousands of ideas. Oh, sorry that should be 15 ideas. The one she was really, really pushing for was an environmental greeting card. Does she have no sense?

Jenny speaks loudly and passionately so people are railroaded into doing things they probably wouldn’t if considered carefully. Anyway, Kevin (IEIID) send Jenny and others off to do “Market research.” Can you think of anything more stupid than going to a card shop and asking whether they’ve done any of the ideas they’ve come up with? And guess what? The card shop doesn’t do an environmental card…

I wonder why you great orange idiot?!

Jenny, then faces camera and brightly says that the environmental card is a great thing to go for because the card shop is sadly lacking them. Why on earth didn’t the team just ask the card shop which cards they get asked for most often and which they don’t stock!? Now that would have helped them get more, and better ideas, for producing a card.

Anyway, Jenny excitedly gets her way and begins to grin hugely and inanely whenever the camera is on her - after all this is her task, she’s project manger and she’s going to make sure it’s a success or at least she’s not fired. Oops, she’s not project manager, it should be that shrinking violet, Kevin, who’s let Jenny steamroll all over him. Except he firmly chooses to do the presentation to the card buyers.

So off they all go to create the cards. Jenny and others are sent to get photos done for the cards. Some of the ideas are quite cute and/or funny.

Sara and Kevin create the cards from the photos they’re sent. When team Orange arrive back Kevin proudly shows them one of the finished cards. Claire is not particularly impressed by the wording. Kevin says they weren’t asking for feedback, just showing them what they’d done!

The team have a few hours before they need to go and present to Clintons, Celebrations and Tesco card buyers.

The obvious person to pitch to the buyers is Claire Young who is a retail buyer herself. When Kevin realises that he just wont be able to do justice to the presentation he asks Claire or Jenny to do it for him. They both smell blood and refuse to do it.

So the woefully unprepared Kevin saunters out to do battle with the buyers. He preaches to them about the environment and at one stage compares one of the card company’s to the American’s not signing the Koyoto agreement! I mean does he want them to buy the cards or not? Maybe as a provider of finance to everyone else you can be incredibly arrogant. It’s not something I would recommend for any business.

And still Jenny keeps wearing a fixed grin…

Then she compounds the team’s stupidity quotient by blithely saying that she has really cut down on sending cards as she’s aware of the environmental impact. Reading between the lines here that simply means I’m better than you so why don’t you just cough up and buy our cards?