nan | 楠木

I’ve spent a lot of time recently catching up on the NBC hit show The Apprentice, and it proves to be a both rewarding and entertaining experience. Although I cannot say my resume is any stronger after watching it, I am confident that I have learnt some practical lessons.

The Apprentice is about leadership and teamwork. It’s also about business sense and practical skills. Creativity also plays a big part in it. So in short you can say that this show reflects basically all the major skills and attributes required in becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Before I go on, for those of you who happened to have missed out on this great show, here are the basic rules of The Apprentice: two teams compete against each other in a series of business tasks, and after each task, the winning team is rewarded while the losing team must go to the boardroom with Donald Trump will fire someone responsible for the loss. When there are only four players remaining, they will be interviewed and another two will be fired. The final two players go up against each one on one in a business challenge, each with a different goal to achieve. Donald Trump will then decide who has done a better job and shown better skills, and choose that person to be his apprentice.

In Season 1, it began as 8 men versus 8 women, and the men were really "handed their asses" by the women early on. The female team easily used their feminine charm to beat the men. It seemed a bit unfair, because we all know and we all see that sex sells, and the men were badly at a disadvantage.

After four tasks, the men were four men down. The women were at such an advantage that the teams had to be reshuffled to make the game more interesting. And this is where the fun really starts in season 1. The two teams now had 4 women and 2 men each, and in the following weeks 7 women got fired consecutively. Then the men lost their performance streak and one got fired, making the final four 3 men and one woman. After the interviewing round that woman got fired too, and it was two men in the final round. A man named Bill Rancic eventually won.

For me, Bill showed his abilities really early on, even when the men were getting a beating from the women. He demonstrated common sense and business intuition, and he had strong ethics. What impressed me most was the way he handled himself under pressure. When being fired tough questions in tough interviews, he would calmly say with a smile: "I respectively disagree. I think…" And what a comfortable smile he has.

Bill has great character. He gets on quite well with others, and I thought that was very important. As a counter-example, a very tough smart woman of Season 1, Omarosa, thought everything was business and didn’t care about her relations with her team mates. It would come back to haunt her and she paid the price. So as a lesson, I would say that indeed business is not personal, but that is no excuse for disrespecting others. If you do treat others poorly, professionally you will fail.

Another lesson I learnt from Season 1 was that sex sells but only sells so much. The women probably learnt this the hard way. As the game went on, the importance of planning and strategy became increasingly important, and unfortunately the women didn’t show their capacity in this region. As the players got fewer and fewer, I honestly have to say there was no chance that the women could win. The last woman to be fired, Amy, was smart and creative, but in the interviewing process she couldn’t fool the interviewers. She lacked the depth to be a leader, and that was probably a problem they all shared.

In Season 2, I was secretly hoping the women could prove me wrong and show me that they too could be great leaders. The season started with a great twist: now it was 9 against 9, but as a start, the teams must exchange one member, making it a team of 8 men and 1 woman and another team vice versa. As it turned out, the female team lost one of their toughest characters, Pamela. They won the first game, however, sending a guy called Rob home. Losing the first game was always unfortunate, as up to this point people really don’t have a lot of time to demonstrate themselves, and as there were so many players, anybody could get blamed for the loss. That was what happened to Rob.

The mostly male team then went on to do great: 3 wins in a row. The mostly female team lost their one male member and two other girls, and more importantly, were at a complete shambles. Everybody hated everybody else, and there was constant plots and conspiracies. For a while I thought things might better after a certain somebody was gone, then next week I find out there’s another person who has just got to go. In the end I understood it was the whole team that was at fault.

Pamela went back to the female team to make the two teams even in numbers, and she got fired after she unsuccessfully tried to get the team together. They redeemed themselves a bit after winning a task that was all about fashion and women’s clothing.

From then on the game progressed. The teams were reshuffled to have 3 men and 3 women each. More people were fired, and some players got desperate in their actions. Kelly (male) and Jennifer (female) made it to the final two. I favored Kelly because he showed consistency throughout, and he really demonstrated strong leadership (he went to West Point), whereas Jennifer really was lacklustre in my eyes. I was surprised she got to the finals, because she really shirked responsibility a number of times in the whole game. And in the end Kelly was chosen by Donald Trump to be the second apprentice.

I thought the contestants of the second season were not as good or outstanding as season 1. The personalities of the contestants in season 1 were great, likable or not. In season 2, nobody really attracted me. There were interesting characters, of course, for example a guy called Raj who always wore butterfly ties and hit on every girl he met. But business and leadership-wise, they seem to pale in comparision with the people of season 1.

And the women– oh are they bad. It’s not that the men didn’t have fights, they did, and they got over it. But with the women it was one conspiracy after another, in both seasons. This goes to say something about the nature of our female counterparts. They always made it personal.

And that’s another lesson I learnt– EQ is indeed more important than IQ. If you can’t handle yourself in a team, and if you can’t get along with people you dislike, or simply people with distinct personalities, there’s no way you are going to go very far. Some of the players just didn’t seem to get this, or maybe it’s simply because I’m standing on the outside.

All in all, it’s been very entertaining and thought provoking, and here I am starting season 3.