The 2010 edition of The Apprentice, NBC’s business reality show starring and executive produced by real estate mogul Donald Trump, features entrepreneurs and professionals competing for a $250,000 job contract with the Trump organization. By now, the format is familiar: Each week the contestants, divided into two teams, must complete a business task. The winning team is rewarded; the losing team must report to the infamous boardroom, where one member will be fired by Trump, who is assisted by his children and Trump organization executives Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The 2010 version of The Apprentice returns to its original premise of a competition of business professionals and entrepreneurs, eschewing the celebrity competition of the past three installments of the reality TV show. The common thread connecting the 16 candidates for this season is that all of them are trying to jump-start careers stalled or disrupted by our nation’s most recent recession. The 2010 edition of The Apprentice features three African American job candidates:
Kelly Beaty, 30, holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Spelman College and a master’s in public communication from American University. A former intern at Black Enterprise, she established a career as a rising star in the high-profile public relations industry before losing her job.
WATCH: Beaty’s Business Tips from Task 2 0f The Apprentice
Gene Folkes, 46, earned a bachelor of science degree in business from Morris Brown College and served in the U.S. Air Force before launching a career as a financial advisor. The Jamaican-born Folkes has been living off of his savings and trying to launch an assisted living facility since being laid off.
Liza Mucheru-Wisner, 30, founder of an educational technology company who was born in Kenya and, as part of the Kenyan National Golf Team, was recruited to play golf at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
With each task of The Apprentice 2010, I will post performance reviews of the candidates, their teams and their project managers. In addition, I will assess the performances of Kelly, Gene and Liza for as long as they remain in The Apprentice talent pool. You can also follow and discuss my commentary on Twitter and Facebook.
Read and comment on other performance reviews of The Apprentice 2010 Tasks.
Leadership Lesson: The best leader is not necessarily the person who knows the most or has the most expertise. Smart leaders correctly utilize people who are smarter and more talented than they are in their respective areas of expertise. (For more read my post “To Be the Best, Recruit the Best.”)
TASK 2: Set up competing ice cream cart locations in Manhattan. The team that delivers the most cash profit wins.
The all-female team, Fortitude, is led by Stanford University graduate Poppy Carlig, the youngest candidate for The Apprentice job at age 23, as project manager. David Johnson, the unemployed sales professional, confidently steps up to lead the male team, Octane. An experienced sales professional, David confidently predicts an easy victory for Octane. As Fortitude’s project manager, Poppy readily admits she’s “never sold anything.” So of course, Fortitude pretty much wipes the floor with Octane.
While Poppy has no sales experience, she’s smart enough to give the most confident salesperson on her team, financial executive Stephanie Castagnier, the authority to lead in that area. She also assigns real estate agent Tyana Alvarado and attorney-turned-entrepreneur Brandy Kuentzel, also experienced salespeople, to Stephanie’s group. And though she gives Stephanie plenty of latitude (at the risk of seeming to surrender her authority as project manager–the mistake which got Nicole Chiu fired on Task 1), Poppy is smart enough to remain engaged by including herself on the sales team. She also makes the
effort to assign the rest of her Fortitude teammates, with varying degrees of success (Liza accepts accounting duties despite not being “an accounting kind of person”), to roles best suited to their talents and comfort zones.By contrast, Octane project manager David’s leadership of his team amounts to two words:Â just sell. He provides his team with no strategy or action plan, basically charging them to use their imaginations and be aggressive–to get people to buy their ice cream by any means necessary. With the exception of attorney James Weir, who took the initiative to go out to get “uniforms” (red-and-white striped vests, straw hats, and various wigs and props) for the team, the rest of Octane rolls with David’s program (or lack thereof) as best they can, despite the lack of direction.
As a result, Octane is in constant reactionary mode in response to Fortitude’s proactive sales efforts, led by the aggressive-to-the-point-of-overbearing Stephanie. On the first day of selling, Octane beats Fortitude to a prime sales location in Manhattan’s Union Square, then surrenders it prematurely, allowing Fortitude to swoop in. Also, the ladies of Fortitude seem more appealing and professional (in pink tank tops as a result of Liza’s insistence on her team establishing a brand identity to distinguish it from the mid-day throng) and less off-putting than the desperate, hyperaggressive Octane. On the second day of selling, Octane again beats Fortitude to the prime sales location. This time, the ladies decide to compete in the same location, prompting David to release his “stallions,” “outgoing and good-looking gentlemen” entrepreneur Steuart Martens and former real estate investment manager Anand Vasudev. (Yes, this time the men, not the women, played the sex-appeal card.) After the two teams battled and squabbled over customers, Fortitude finds another great location, enjoying brisk sales in an area of Union Square filled with parents and their kids.
But the knock-out punch comes as the second day of selling draws to a close: Fortitude goes straight “gangsta” and again invades Octane’s location–this time undercutting the men’s sales efforts by giving away their ice cream–which they’d been selling for a pricey $5 per item to that point–for free. The men, caught totally flat-footed, have no answer for Fortitude’s bold move.The Result: Octane, which generated $1,500 in profits on their ice cream sales, is defeated by Fortitude, which beat their rivals by a significant 20 percent margin, delivering $1,800 in profits. On the first task, Gene, at 46 the oldest candidate in the talent pool for The Apprentice, ably represented Baby Boomers as the winning project manager. This week, Fortitude project manager Poppy, the baby in this class of candidates, scored one for Generation Next. She did a good job as project manager, despite Stephanie playing such a dominant role. Good leaders recognize that they only need to be the best and smartest at leadership–not at everything or anything else. It’s far more important to lead the best team, than to be the smartest person on the team.
Who I Would Have Fired: I absolutely would have fired David, Octane’s project manager on this task. “Just Do It” may have done wonders as a slogan for Nike, but leadership requires communicating how to do it. Other than consistently beating Fortitude to prime sales locations, David, a self-proclaimed top sales veteran, demonstrated zero sales ability and no sales strategy, leaving it to members of his team to make things up as they went along.
That said, I have no quarrel with Trump firing technician-turned-tow truck driver Alex Delgado. He did seem outmatched by his rivals, and becoming Trump’s next apprentice just didn’t seem that important to him–like the guy who is happy to be invited to the competition, but not all that
determined to win it. In a tie between Alex and David over who to fire, Alex was the easiest to let go. The ongoing conflict between David and James offers a far stronger reality TV storyline than bland, affable, underachiever Alex. Besides, David seems so volatile, so barely under control, that I’m betting he’s “dead man walking”–fired, but just doesn’t know it yet. Until the axe drops, might as well let the viewers enjoy the drama.Interim Evaluations of the Black Candidates: Gene did not distinguish himself positively or negatively during his team’s failed execution of this task. Kelly was impressive when she professionally but pointedly put Steuart in check for calling her teammates disparaging names as he pitched ice cream to potential customers during Octane and Fortitude’s head-to-head skirmish. (During her live chat with BlackEnterprise.com after the show aired last night, Kelly shared that most of her contributions as the lead marketing expert on her team have ended up on the cutting room floor so far.)
However, Liza is beginning to establish herself as a force to be reckoned with. In addition to getting her team to create a brand identity that would boost the effectiveness of their sales efforts, she continues to be vocal in the boardroom, this time defending herself against Poppy and Brandy’s naming her Fortitude’s weakest team member. (She was struck speechless, though, when Trump told her, “You’re fired.” He was just kidding.)
But the biggest challenge facing Liza could be whether or not she will pay a price for using the “b-word” in angry response to the suggestion that she should be fired if her team had lost the task, raising the spectre of her being typecast as the Omarosa of this edition of The Apprentice. (I’m thinking that might be David, actually.) Will this come back to haunt Liza? Tell me what you think.