Last night’s episode of the Apprentice focused our attention on one key point; and I hope you didn’t miss it.
Sadly, the two teams did, in their different ways, miss the point. And the candidate who did so most spectacularly, paid the price.
The task was to create an awareness-raising campaign to support the promotion of English Sparkling Wine. The teams had to do this principally by creating a website and a short video, and then pitch their campaigns to a panel of industry experts. To support them, they had access to a vineyard and a wine tasting opportunity, a web designer, and a video crew and editing suite. All they needed were some creativity and some sensitivity to the brief.
The creativity part was, of course, going to be interesting to me, having argued for its importance in an earlier blog. I was, frankly, pretty disappointed.
The Teams
Lord Sugar balanced the two teams by inviting Phoenix to select a fourth member from Sterling. They quickly chose Nick Holzherr, whom I too see as a strong candidate. We have not, to be fair, seen a huge amount of good performance from Nick, but neither does he place his feet wrongly too often. He calmly contributes well: good choice.
Phoenix, thus bolstered, selected Tom Gearing, unsurprisingly (he is a director of a Fine Wine business) as Project Manager, to lead Tom, Jade Nash and Adam Corbally
Sterling, thus depleted all wanted to lead. All voted except Stephen Brady and he cast the final vote in favour of Ricky Martin, who led Stephen, Jenna Whittingham and Gabrielle Omar
While Ricky sized up his opposition: “forget Tom knows wine, Nick knows websites and Jade knows marketing”, Stephen dived headfirst into the task of naming their product, coming up with “Cert”, “Grandeur” and “Chink”. I am lost for words and, in the car with Stephen, so was Gabrielle. So let’s track back to “Tom knows wine, Nick knows websites and Jade knows marketing”. So, Ricky, what does Adam know? Ah yes, fruit and veg. Not sparkling wine, it appeared. Once again out of his comfort zone, Tom had to explain what Champagne is, and how it relates to English sparkling wine.
I have to declare that this was the week that Stephen really got to me and I did feel for Gabrielle as she tried to focus on understanding the branding choices of existing sparkling wines at a large supermarket, while Stephen buzzed around looking for a wine expert to answer all his questions. It seems that, despite this interference, Gabrielle did get. Her design ideas and her brand image were spot on and both the panel and Lord Sugar were later to complement her Rose/Champagne glass logo idea.
If only she had confidently batted back Stephen’s stupid idea to label the wine “Grandeur”, thus choosing a French word to represent an English product that is trying to clearly distinguish itself from a better known French product. D’ohhh. This is not the first time that a foreign word has been implicated in a team’s failure.
Among the opposition, Tom and Adam were having rather too much fun at a wine tasting and showing pretty conclusively that, whilst good wine is good business, its influence can make you look and act like a fool. Still, through the haze of light-headedness, Adam did retain one piece of information for the next day’s video shoot. Hold the glass at the foot. If only he’d been equally precise in his use of the word choreography as he was in his repeating of that instruction to the actors. Is it just me, or was Jade not enjoying working with Adam on making the video?
Meanwhile, Ricky sent Stephen and Jenna off to make a video that would emphasise the word he had heard most clearly at his visit to the vineyard: “quality”. Jenna, however, wanted to emphasise humour. Taking on the mantel of John Cleese, she enjoined the actors to ham it up and go for laughs. Would the resulting video demonstrate quality? You could tell Ricky was getting concerned over the phone but was backing off confrontation. His push for quality soon turned into a plaintive begging for “not too cheesy”. Addressing camera after the call, it sounded more like hope than expectation when he told us he thought they had understood. We knew – and he did too – that all was lost. “Let’s hope it will win”said Jenna “or it’s on my head.” Prophetic?
Preparing to Pitch
The faces of the two project managers when they viewed their teams’ videos – which neither had supervised directly – were a treat. Neither should consider a career in professional poker! That “oh no, we’ve lost” moment signalled in Tom, utter contempt and a feeling of abject fear, when he saw Adam’s dull, clichéd, uninformative video. And Ricky, manfully, tried to look impressed at a video that clearly was “too cheesy”. No, cheesy is the wrong word: tacky would hardly do it justice. Pity the actors who will, doubtless, be conveniently forgetting the whole experience when updating their resumés.
Spoiler Alert
Polychronicity is the tendency to multi-task. High multi-taskers are “polychrons”. Research shows that is, for most people at most times, less efficient and effective than serial monochronicity – doing one thing at a time, one after the other.
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