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. This edition of The Apprentice features three African American job candidates: Kelly Beaty, Gene Folkes and Liza Mucheru-Wisner.
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.
Read and comment on other performance reviews of The Apprentice 2010 Tasks.
Leadership Lesson: A leader’s job is not only to set the course, but to monitor performance, to ensure that everything stays on course–and to take decisive action when things go awry. Nothing justifies a captain’s failure to take the helm when it’s obvious that the ship is heading for a collision with an iceberg.
Bonus Lesson: When guilty of a major failure on the job, accept responsibility for the failure–then shut up. Never suggest or volunteer for punishment. If the boss asks you to recommend your own punishment, don’t take the bait. Assert your trust in your boss’s decision-making authority, while making the argument for your past positive contributions and future value to the organization despite your most recent failure. Your goal should be to avoid being fired and to be given another chance. NEVER, out of a grand show of personal accountability or an over-estimation of your own value, invite your boss to fire you. If you’ve committed a “capital offense”, the last thing you need to do is to point out to the “executioner” that he has an axe in his hands and the right to swing it–as if he didn’t know that already.
TASK 5: Present fashion shows featuring the Spring/Summer 2011 product line for Rockport Shoes, with the men of Octane showcasing the women’s line and the women of Fortitude showcasing the men’s.
Wade Hanson, following through on the promise he made to Trump to lead on a task after Octane’s loss on Task 3, is project manager on this task. Stephanie Castagnier confidently steps up to lead Fortitude.
Stephanie immediately springs into confident, decisive action as her team’s leader, calling on her team to focus on winning, not exploiting one another’s weaknesses. She assigns Kelly, citing her creativity and flair for fashion, to handle production of the fashion show. She tasks Liza and Poppy Carlig with assisting Kelly and charges Mahsa Saeidi-Azcuy with keeping the team on schedule. For the role of fashion show emcee, Stephanie chooses Brandy Kuentzel, because she’s “beautiful, polished and an eloquent speaker….that’s who I want on the microphone.” Stephanie also comes up with a “Day in the Life” of a sophisticated, style-savvy male potential customer of Rockport Shoes, in response to Kelly calling for a theme for Fortitude’s show. Her team immediately buys in, with Mahsa even giving their ideal customer a name, Tristan (Brad Pitt’s character in the 1994 film Legends of the Fall
). Then, Stephanie calls for something risky and bold to put Fortitude’s fashion show over the top. Kelly responds with an idea guaranteed to be a jaw-dropper: a finale featuring their male models wearing nothing but underwear and Rockports. (In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly credited Stephanie with coming up with the idea for the finale.) With the exception of Poppy, her entire team enthusiastically embraces the idea, although Kelly later worries that the move could backfire. After Kelly and Poppy go shopping for their models, the fashion show rehearsal goes without a hitch, except for Liza pointing out to Kelly a model with scrapes and scratches on his legs should not be modeling in shorts. Kelly ignores Liza’s suggestion that a different model wear that outfit.On Task 4, when Wade deferred to Clint Robertson’s determination to be project manager despite promising Trump he would lead on that task, many (including Clint) believed that Wade was unprepared for leadership. On Task 5, Wade leaves no doubt of that. Rather assessing their abilities and assigning tasks, he pretty much let’s his team do whatever they want. Gene volunteers to emcee (citing experience with public speaking), but says he’s also open to David Johnson filling that role. When David says he absolutely wants to emcee, Wade, instead of making the call, gives both of them the job as co-emcees. Wade suggests that Anand Vasudev and Stueart Martens handle wardrobe for the models. After that, it’s unclear who’s in charge, as Wade seems like a mildly irritated bystander, not the project leader on this task. It’s clear during Octane’s disastrous rehearsal that David and Gene are totally unprepared to emcee the show, largely because Gene, caught up in the minutia of shoe descriptions, has not come close to completing the script. As for Octane’s fashion show theme: there was none.
The Result: Fortitude put on an excellent fashion show. In fact, with the exception of the model showing off his scratched-up legs, it was perfect. By contrast, Octane’s show started off badly and got progressively worse with each agonizing stroll up the catwalk, as Gene (left twisting in the wind at the podium by David) stammers and stumbles through his “narration”, screwing up names of models and shoes while awkwardly holding notes on paper in one hand and an open laptop in the other. Another lopsided win, this time for the ladies of Fortitude.
Who I Would Have Fired: Prior to the boardroom session, I would have fired Wade, who was absolutely brain-dead as project manager. Even if he wanted to give Gene and David the benefit of the doubt, there’s no way to justify his not jumping in with both feet after Octane’s disastrous rehearsal and taking over emcee duties himself if necessary. Actually, the best solution would have been to assign the task to Steuart, the Octane team member with right combination of smarts, charm, good-looks and chutzpah to wing it. He certainly would have gotten the models’ names right, having happily spent most of the previous day shopping with them.
That said, and even though I make my firing decision before the boardroom sessions during which Trump makes his call, Gene deserved to be fired–not so much because he was such a disaster on the task, but because he literally asked for it. I believed that his ego just couldn’t take being presented on national television as poor and inarticulate speaker, and that Trump harping on his terrible performance as emcee caused Gene’s pride to get the better of him. How else do you explain his telling an obviously agitated Trump, “You can fire me if you want to”, knowing his terrible performance had already given the real estate mogul plenty of cause to do so? Wade was fired because of his performance on the task. Gene could have survived his poor performance on the task. He was fired because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut in the boardroom.
Interim Evaluations of the Black Candidates: Gene is gone, and that’s a shame. He’d shown himself to be an impressive performer through the first four tasks (including his win as project manager on Task 1), and I believe Trump would have given him the benefit of the doubt if Gene had held his tongue in the boardroom.
For the first time, the producers of The Apprentice allowed Kelly to shine on this task. Her coaching of the models to demonstrate the “walkability” that is the unique selling proposition of the Rockport Shoe brand (encouraging them to bounce, skip, stretch and jump in the shoes) and her idea to close out Fortitude’s show with the models wearing only underwear with their shoes were major factors in Fortitude’s win. She loses points for ignoring Liza’s suggestion that a model with scraped knees should not be modeling shorts (and unsuccessfully trying to play it off in the boardroom). But she did an excellent job of demonstrating that selling, especially in fashion, is about showing, not just telling. Maybe Gene was too busy memorizing the design specs of each shoe to read that memo.
Liza’s candidacy continues to be problematic. It’s not good that Kelly dismissed her not because Liza was wrong, but Kelly doesn’t seem to respect Liza enough to care what she thinks. If Liza has lost the respect of Kelly, one of the easiest of the women to get along with, what hope does she have with the others, including Stephanie (who’s openly declared Liza the team’s weak link) and Poppy (who Liza called a “bitch” after Task 2).
Dead Men Walking: David and Mahsa, with no new additions. I’m tempted to add Liza to the list, but I’d really like to see her get a shot as a project manager before giving up on her.
Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? Could Gene have avoided the axe? Was I the only screaming “SHUT UP, GENE!” at the television? And is Liza “dead man walking?” Leave a comment and let’s talk about it!