Ordinary Gweilo

[I was quite sure I posted this on Monday, but it disappeared for some reason]

The first series of the UK version of The Apprentice appears to have been highly successful, and here in Hong Kong we are already on to the third series of the Donald Trump original.

In the first three weeks the losing project manager has been fired each time, and it’s really hard to fault the logic behind this. So far we have seen three textbook examples of weak management, all from people who must have watched the first two series and yet failed to learn a single thing. I can only assume that they have been picked because they will make the show more interesting rather than for their ability.

In the first week the teams had to sell burgers. Todd’s idea of managing was to sit on his own, scribbling notes, and then to call up team members and not give them a hard time at all. Very obviously he should have been more hands-on, and needed to ensure that they had enough people trained up to work the tills. They didn’t, and they lost as a result. Danny’s lacklustre marketing really didn’t seem to make any difference – there were enough customers in the two stores and all they needed to do was be able to sell them their featured burger.

Brian was seen in the first episode demonstrating his negotiating skills by acquiring a plastic Viking along with whatever it was he was supposed to be buying. In the second task he was the project manager as the team tried to renovate a motel in 48 hours.  Luckily he got a very good deal on 14 brand new toilets (to replace the functional ones that were already in place). Unfortunately for him, this meant the team didn’t have the money to pay for things they really needed, such as new carpets, and they lost. He admitted that he deserved to be fired, and Trump duly obliged. The best part was in the taxi afterwards when he complained bitterly that Mr Trump had missed out on a really good negotiator. Yeah, right – 14 toilets and a plastic viking hat.

Mind you, in week three Danny could probably have done with Brian’s help negotiating with the event planner they hired to help them give away cups of what Donald Trump kindly told us was "very good" coffee from Nescafe. Sadly for him, he overpaid and also failed to come up with a ‘big idea’, so when the team lost he was almost bound to be fired. The team tried hard to get Michael fired for his petulant behaviour after his ‘big idea’ had been rejected, but he had immunity because he had been the winning team captain the previous week and Trump wasn’t going to be talked into changing the rules.

In spite of this, Danny picked Michael to go into the boardroom, and Trump got rather upset by this insolence and fired him. Right decision, wrong reason – which is, I suppose, an improvement on the previous season when Bradford got fired for something similar when he didn’t deserve it.  Actually, it wasn’t at all clear who else Danny could blame for what went wrong, so it wasn’t as crass a decision as Trump seemed to think.

Danny’s departure was probably inevitable – it’s a fairly reliable rule that the people who get noticed in the early weeks also get fired, and that the eventual winner will be someone who has kept a low profile. Perhaps they pick a mixture of interesting people who get fired early on and a few who are more competent for the later stages.

Of course there is another possibility – they edit the show so as to make the contestants (or at least some of them) look as bad as possible.  In this week’s task, there wasn’t actually all that much to choose between the two teams, but of course there has to be a winner and a loser – and the latter gets a hard time from Trump and his stooges.  All the better if we have seen something that supports Trump’s decision.