I can see Stella nailing the interview but still getting fired.

Chris and Jo.

Well, I'd agree on Jamie. He's probably very competent at what he does and will do well without wasting a year or so as cheap (the production company pay the £100k salary) labour for Sugar.

Hilarious that you think the last episode will rule Joanna out. Her little spat with Jamie was as nothing compared to the flare up between Chris and Stuart - it wasn't even mentioned in the boardroom and Sugar knows, as you say yourself, that Jamie is a loner and it was almost certainly his non cooperation that was the prime cause of the problem

Also quite amusing that you state that Stella has no business experience (you do realise that banks are businesses? ) and yet you don't think that will be a problem for Chris.

While I do see what you're saying here, I think you have to take into consideration their people management skills - particularly after last week's episode. Stella has shown that she's a far, far better manager of people than Joanna whose hectoring of Jamie shows she has a lot to learn.


I don't see much of Yasmina in Joanna. Joanna isn't showing anything like the rounded skill set Yasmina had. I think Joanna's a similar character to Debrabarr. Talented but needs a lot of controlling/reigning in. I saw Liz as a weaker version of Kate Walsh. The only Stella comparison I can think of its that she's a stronger and more likeable version of Helene.

What do you think would happen if Joanna and Jamie were PM and team leader respectively working for a real company and they each reported to the next level of management as a result of what we saw? Jamie would complain that the team leader kept asking him questions. Joanna would complain that Jamie would not answer her questions. In the real world, who do you think management would castigate?

Joanna for trying to get the information that she was entitled to fulfill her roll as PM?

Or Jamie for wanting to work alone and exclude his PM from the information loop?

It really is almost unbelievable that so many people looked at that task almost as if it were a wife giving her husband GBH of the ear 'ole rather than a project manager trying to do her job. Obviously, if the PM in question were over managing people then s/he would get a name for it and, doubtless, be given some advice. But on the basis of one incident I can promise you that it would be Jamie who got into trouble for not respecting the management structure.


Would you like to justify that comment?

You may be correct - I liked and rated Yasmina highly and wanted her to win - but I'm having trouble seeing how you have managed to come to the conclusion that she had a much better skill set.

Again, you may be correct and I'm genuinely interested - I certainly wouldn't suggest it's the other way around. Can you, for example, name three skills where Yasmina showed she was superior to Joanna?

I didnt know that Sugar doesnt pay the salary. If thats the case he shouldnt be the decider who wins. This is news to me and puts a different complexion on the whole saga. At least he should have to explain his actions without just saying Liz is no good for me. I still dont know why.
Joanna not leaving him alone to work out his spiel, it didnt look like she could have helped, to me rules her out.
Chris is first of all I think younger and a male which makes it easier to train. No youre right if I had someone else I wouldnt take him either.
A banker is not a business in the real sense of the word or should I say world. One is not buying or selling a real useful product. It is more of a gamble. I am still not sure what her job is exactly in the banking world or chris' for that matter.
Is it to customers to part with their money to buy investments. I am sure LS would really like to know. Having passed exams means nothing. I am personally more knowledgeable about the type of investments I undertake than any bank financial advisor.
He has said he doesnt want a salesman, by which he means a barrow boy, or trader in banking terms.
I am not sure where the spark of brilliance can be in banking.
Stuart at the end of the day is running his own company which is more than the others are doing.
I have yet to see any facts and figures about Joanna's cleaning company. What does she clean, offices early in the morning, windows, the streets, or plain houses. Although commendable for her not exactly rocket science needing sparks of brilliance.
The preview about her not knowing all LS shady business deals is rather tame. Its hard to keep up as he opens and closes his companies. With his outside shareholders losing money.

Jepson I know you've been having this conversation across a few threads.

I do feel very strongly that good people management involves giving your reports the time and space to do their job. It also involves understanding how people work best and respecting that as it will ensure they do the best job possible.

It was obvious to me that:
A) Jamie was perfectly capable of doing this well - a good manager would have understood that he did not need 'hand held' through the process
B) Jamie tends to prefer working on his own and the nature of the task was one which required a certain amount of solitary thinking time, time which he needed to be given.

Joanna missed all of these points. It was impossible for Jamie to do any thinking with Joanna constantly talking into his ear and the way in which she tried to micro manage did nothing to help him - it hindered his progress.

A good manager needs to be able to trust capable people and let go. In the real world managers simply can't have the kind of control that Joanna wanted to take here. In a business environment she would have been reprimanded for micro-managing a perfectly competent employee, for failing to delegate well and for failing to understand how her employees work most effectively.


I probably should have preceded my comment by saying that IMO Yasmina was a really exceptional candidate.

I do think Joanna's very talented - she's a good saleswoman, she's good at pitching, she's very personable and of all the candidates this year, she's the one who has come up with the clever ideas that make all the difference (getting the car for the video task for example).

Yasmina had all of this, but I think she had more besides. First of all I think she was better at getting the best out of her team than Joanna. She managed people better (a good example would be sending Debrabarr off to work on her own in the QVC task when she and Debra had just had a scrap. Yasmina loosened the strings and gave her a bit of freedom and Debra sold shedloads).

Yasmina also had a knack for identifying a gap in the market which she could exploit. She showed this in the week 2 task when she went for the rock bottom pricing structure while pitching food that sounded exactly right for her market. She showed this really strongly in the final when she identified a gap in market at the low price point and targeted that with her product.

Finally, she had a real knack for branding/marketing which is rare on the Apprentice (though to be fair to Joanna they haven't had many marketing tasks this year - though the one they did have was a disaster). Yasmina's chocolate branding in the final was superb, really took my breath away. And she PMed and won on the Margate task which was a re-branding exercise.

That's not to say Joanna's not good - I just think Yasmina was exceptional.

Some very good points.

I suppose that part of the problem comes down to the way they have to split into sub teams and then get trailed by the cameras. Joanna obviously didn't want to be seen to do nothing during that part of the task and if she was letting Jamie actually set up the tour all she could really do was try and monitor what he was doing. This clearly didn't work. It may well be that if the cameras weren't following them she would have just let him get on with it but she couldn't possibly risk being seen to do nothing the whole time.

I don't really think this episode was a big deal at all. It's just something that Joanna's detractors have seized upon and rather blown up out of proportion.


Thanks.

You certainly could back up you view.

I think it's a problem with the programme as a whole that for most of the tasks most of the candidates don't really have much of a chance to shine. The elusive 'spark' that Sugar's always going on about is not something the every team member gets the chance to show every task. Or even very much during the entire process.

The programme is designed to make 'good' TV rather than properly test the candidates. On the 'cleaner' task, for example, you'd get a far better idea of who had a spark by telling each candidate to go away and come up with a name, an angle, a design for packaging and a storyboard for an advert and getting experts to judge those.

Similarly with pitching, you'd get a better idea of the candidates capabilities by having each of them pitch a few products/services/ideas to a set of experts who would judge who had the best skills.

Unfortunately this would make a programme that would attract a much smaller audience on BBC4.

Good point, but if only companies worked this way.

I was thinking a Chris and Joanna final but someone raised the issue of LS splitting the teams to make sure he could fire one from each - In which case, he rated Stella over Liz, so Stella could get it.

Joanna has made some mistakes now. She failed to understand why Chris's deal with the advert agency was a good idea; she even went back and tried to renegotiate it. She got quite a lot of criticism from Lord Sugar this episode.

That's stuff that she can probably learn. She also needs to learn not to micro-manage. She's done that quite a lot. Mostly recently Jamie in the tourism task. She also tried to control Stella's choice of flavours in the German crisp task.

Chris and Stella. Stuart is merely being kept in for the entertainment factor, Jo is too aggressive and I think Lord Sugar sees Jamie as just a good salesperson (even though many of us see him as more than that).

Its far from clear that the negotiation he agreed was a good idea or even intentionally one if it was - I agree Lord Sugar may assume it was a good idea and act accordingly . Sugar criticised her for trying to renegotiate a contract, but then supported the idea that the quality of the tours didn't matter once you had their money - second guessing his shifting idea of morality is difficult.

She's micromanaged when she's wrong and micromanaged when she's right- but her judgement has been better than most people who are left and she hasn't had their howlers.

You've said this before and you're just as wrong now as you were then.

She thought the 20% off the top was a bad idea not that getting the deal was a bad idea in toto.


Sugar can be a bit of a pratt. He doesn't mind people lying on their CV or lying to people with whom they are dealing or lying to him about their religion or whether you serve decent food to people who've paid for it or whether you give people a decent tour when they've paid for it but then baulks at someone trying to rescue a daft deal.

As networkbabe says, trying to second guess his barrow boy ethics is not an easy task.


Well, that's exactly the sort of thing that Sugar should be good at teaching his 'apprentice'. Remember this isn't a search for a fully qualified business person it's a search for someone who wants to learn.


For very good reasons. She was PM and he wasn't cooperating. Had he behaved in a reasonable manner towards his PM that wouldn't have happened (probably).


No **** Sherlock?

You mean she was sent out to do market research and then, when she had found out what the best selling flavours were she actually had the temerity to tell someone?

Jeez, thank God no other market researchers share their findings.

Oh, wait ...

Personally, I blame the production company for that. It was undoubtedly their design of the task that was at fault; sending someone to do market research that could not be done before the other sub team had already worked out some flavours.

It was obvious that either the market research or the flavour work done by the other sub-team was going to be redundant and Joanna just expected her work to actually have some bearing on the task as it was carried out.

Market research is the biggest failure of the UK show. It leads to duff projects, random winners and the phenomena where its far from clear who does anything well enough to win or that whats praised actually happened. Its compounded by the number of tasks where they have to reinvent the wheel and end up with square ones . Contrast it to the US series where they have internet access and more often have fully worked up product to sell or something finite and established to promote. There you can have someone like Kendra who won 3 tasks brilliantly as PM and won several more for her team because she always got the market and price right. You really have to ask why the UK has tasks that can't be completed well and only uses technology from the pre-computer age.

That would be my point. This thread is not so much about who ought to go through, as predicting who actually will. In other words, it's about predicting which way Lord Sugar will jump.


Regardless of whether that's true, I think she got him wrong this time, and her card is marked as a result. (Again, it doesn't matter whether you or I agree with her choices.)


Agreed.

Also, it's perhaps worth remembering that Lord Sugar likes to give everyone a hard time at some point, so he may have made a bigger deal of his criticisms than he privately feels.

Agreed. The point remains: it's no longer true to say Joanna has never put a foot wrong.


She didn't just tell them, she tried to dictate to the PM, at some lengths, what she should do.


Maybe. Or maybe Joanna was too slow to get the research done and the results back. Or maybe Stella was too quick to make her decisions and should have waited.

I think there was some bad management, or poor communication, or what have you. I'd mostly blame Stella. She should have given Joanna a deadline for when her results needed to be available if they were to be used; or else she should have given Joanna a call just before making the flavours choice, to get whatever results were available (and then set Joanna free for sales).

It doesn't change the fact that Joanna showed the same traits in that phone call that she showed on several other occasions.

Or, to spin it another way. She just wanted the work she'd done to count for something.


You have to ask what the PMs was supposed to be doing whilst the other sub-teams were doing the research. The PMs had nothing to do except get the flavours sorted out and the other sub-teams had nothing to do except the market research. It's fairly obvious that someone's work was going to be wasted and that seems to have been built into the task's design.

I well remember watching the conversation about the flavours for the very first time an wondering:

a) Why Stella was surprised that Joanna was pushing for them to take notice of her market research - as otherwise she'd just wasted her morning.

and

b) Why the hell the producers had set the task up in such a way that one of the sub-team's work would get junked.


That trait being that she wanted her work to form part of the task. An entirely reasonable thing to want as Sugar has fired people in the past when other people have fouled up on the basis that they 'hadn't done much'.

Talking of flavours. Exactly how is the next task to be decided. By who has the better taste buds!

Isn't it the interviews this week - so its more who has the best tongue!

The official spoiler thread now has the definitive final 2 as the you're fired interview show has now taken place. I've haven't checked the spoiler but I can guess which two it will probably be.

The two remaining candidates are challenged to launch a new high-quality alcoholic beverage in front of an audience of industry experts - before Alan Sugar reveals who he has chosen to work alongside him in a job with a six-figure salary

I will be astonished if Joanna gets through to the final after seeing a clip of one of her interviews.

I am fascinated by the comments on this thread and posters reasoning.

I cannot be nearly as eloquent or detailed in my reasoning, but here's my take:

Stuart should get the elbow as, I'm afraid to say, he's a joke and not in a fun way. He's got the sort of face I'd never tire of punching!!

Chris could be employed to read stories on CDs to help cure insomnia. His speaking voice has all the rise and fall of a snooker table.

Jamie is not a team player, given the chance and, to me, appears to be a single minded, solo type of guy who doesn't suffer fools-anyone who doesn't agree 100% with him.

Jo. I'd hate to disagree with her. She'd wear you down to saying black is white just to get her off your case.

Stella-ice maiden. She is so contained, it's as though she has cornered the market in cling film suits.

Yeah! Really insightful comments yes?? For the first year, I'm really not bothered who wins-I'm just looking forward to seeing Margaret in probe-mode. Heaven help any would-be apprentices with skeletons in their closets!!

The very best of luck to all 5 and just bring on the interviews!!

I honestly believe it is between Stella/Joanna/Stuart, I just get the impression that by saving Stuart in a very controversial boardroom decision last week, LS is not just going to let him go but keep him until third or second place to prove that spark he saw etc.

Stella and Joanna.

The only who can't possibly go through is Stuart. Other than that it's wide open. I wouldn't discount either Jamie or Chris and think Loralun might want a male in the final this time.

joanna and jamie i think