Jamie has been criticised a lot on here for the last task. Yes, his organisation skills were poor and he shouldn't have lingered on the worktop for so long but he was a much better, more professional negotiator than Chris and Stuart. I feel people aren't giving him enough credit here.

*crickets*
*tumbleweed*

I agree with you completely. In terms of negotiation he was the best on this task. He isn't much of a leader though and is pretty bad at organisation, he has talents but he needs someone else to put him on the right track.

He totally 'got' this task but so did the other boys tbf. I know some of you have issues with the others' tall stories but that is the nature of the beast and the end justifies the means, afaic. A sale is a sale (i.e. of mutual benefit) and no one believed any of it so no harm done. Let's also not forget Jamie only sourced 2 items.

I wouldn't go mad: he's been pretty average overall.

In my OP, I pointed out the things he did wrong, so I'm not going mad. I'm saying he was good at negotiating. If he had been able to find those items, he may have done very well negotiating on them too. In the real world, he would have time to do this.

The tasks aren't judged on what you may or may not have achieved 'in the real world' nor any 'ifs' or 'buts' are they? Everything you've said there only highlights poor time management.

His good negotiating in the two items he did get represents poor time management? I think how things happen in the real world should be taken into account, seeing as the winner will be working in a real world job.

I agree with OP.

He negotiated well without resorting to the lies that Chris used.

Whilst it's easy to criticise his organisational skills we are, again, using hindsight to inform us of the difficulty of finding the items.

As much as the girls didn't seem to realise just how much of a discount they could get - especially with a camera crew in attendance - the boys clearly didn't realise just how much difficulty would be involved in finding the items.

I agree that he was the one that negotiated really well without resorting to Delboy tactics and tall stories.

I loved him in this episode

"I'm going to Southall I tell you. Southall!!!"

Jamie's been given credit for (a) for identifying the issue of cost which Liz missed and (b) for his own personal negotiations. I have also given him credit for the locations he picked because you can tell that the boys were in better areas than the girls from the comments made by Nick and LS in the boardroom. The implication was the girls were in the wrong areas.

The problem for Jamie is, his own productivity was so bad in only negotiating for two items, that it vastly outweighs the good points he made in the task and he has been rightly criticised for this. You can't really explain this away by saying well he did well in the negotiations he was successful in because it was such a bad overall performance and he would have gone if the boys had lost because Chris and Stuart did their total of the negotiation and negotiated better than he did in terms of results. He was the only really underperforming part of the team.

He spent the entire boardroom whining about his search for the kitchen item when he should have poured time into finding the other two items. This almost cost the boys a win when their negotiations were vastly superior to the girls who overall were awful.

So Jamie has had credit but it's outweighed by the rightful criticism.

On this board, there really has been a dearth of people willing to give Jamie credit for the things he did well on the task. Well, that's my observation anyway.

And this thread, as the title states relates to his negotiation skills, not his wider task performance. I realise he made mistakes. But so many people have praised his teammates for their performance and I just felt it was worth noting that he negotiated very well without using their wide boy tactics. I wouldn't call their tactics as vastly superior to the girls. So, I wouldn't have thought it unfair if they'd lost to the girls. Jamie was the best negotiator out of all the candidates.

That's a bit like comparing 2 people who sit an exam consisting of 5 compulsory questions worth 20 marks each: one completes 2 questions, attaining full marks for each; another completes all 5 but only gets 12 marks for each. Who does better?

Spending a whole day sourcing 2 items is poor and cannot be overlooked. If you don't want FMs to bring it up in order to justify their case for why he doesn't deserve special praise, you shouldn't have started the thread.

Once again, I haven't overlooked it. I've acknowledged it a number of times in this thread. Can people not read? I have said that he clearly fell down in other areas.

This thread is about his negotiating skills, not his wider task performance. And his negotiating skills were better than anyone elses.

So why do you patronisingly, defensively and pointlessly keep asking responders to refer to your OP? Especially when everyone on here has acknowledged his negotiation was spot on. And yet you accuse others of not being able to read. Tedious.

Over & out.:yawn::sleep:

What a loss.

And if the camera's weren't there the jeweller would have told him to f**k off there sharpish.

As would all those sellers who 'negotiated' with Chris and Baggs.

I agree. I have tried to give him credit. In particular, I'm sure I've used him to illustrate that you can get good discounts without having to lie. That's important to me.

On the worktop, when the girls buy it the cash register gives the list price as £270. I don't know if that's the same as the list price Lord Sugar used, but it's indicative. It suggests that the worktop was not just the hardest item to buy (because it had to be ordered in advance), but also the most expensive. The other items he failed to find were the hemp rope and chicken feet. We don't know how much the girls paid for those, but they don't sound expensive. The boys were fined £511.50, so the total of the 3 items he missed was £361.50, so if the worktop was £270 the other two must be £91.50.

So the worktop could have been worth 3 times as much as the other two items put together. That helps to explain why he was willing to spend so much time trying to source it.

Me too. That's my whole point really. I really didn't respect the Chris's and Stuart's wideboy approach.

Jamie did well at begging desperately. If there hadn't been camera's with him, I'm sure he'd have been told politely but firmly to f**k off, especially in that jewellers.
Last edited by mary patricia : 06-12-2010 at 18:48

But who told them to have a story? He planted the seed in their minds. Sure, they went OTT with it but Jaime is in part responsible for those lies. It's like saying someone is innocent of a crime just because he hired a hitman to pull the trigger. He basically told them to lie so they could save his arse to be honest. There was no question who would go had they lost considering how Sugar had a go at him for just finding two items.

Yeah, he haggled well, so credit to that but to say that he wasn't at least in part also responsible for those lies is blinkered.

Hmmm, I forgot about that actually. But their stories were embarrassing and probably not what he had in mind.