Over the years from Saira, to Paul, to Syed to Stuart, Sugar always seems to like them, wants to take them on, and then gets cold feet or gets put off at the very end and never hires them!

Is Sugar a "tease" on this?!

he hired Lee

Sugar actually seems to go for people with a lot of confidence and seems to be far too ready to let people sweet talk him in the boardroom - often realising his mistake very quickly afterwards.

I wouldn't describe him in that way. I'm on about the general "loudmouths", blagger types.


Yes, your right.

Like gobby Joanna, loudmouth who never made much sense and seemed rather slow, but managed to get to the latter stages, and get a big goodbye speech...

I found her to be loud and high maitenance but she wasn't really a blagger.

I don't think shes a blagger either, just a bit too stupid for the show.

Joanna had a very good record in the tasks, got praised by got Nick and Karen, got good reports from the interviewers and was streets ahead of her nearest competitor on the 'rate the candidates' thread on this site.

On top of that it was evident that she impressed all the people on YF last night.

Of course, there have been a small number of posters here who take every opportunity to bad mouth her but they are really embarrassing themselves (if they have the sense to realise it) with their obsessive negativity.


Which is why she had no trouble seeing off so many who were, on paper, much better qualified.

(And that's not to mention the thousands she beat just to get on the programme in the first place.)

The fact she got good reviews even though she was terrible in the interviews negates everything else.

They just seemed to feel sorry for a girl who is genuine, but very goby and a bit stupid...

Can't rememeber her excelling in any tasks, and her goading of Jamie was horrible.

That doesn't even make sense.

Did you not notice that they showed the low points for everyone in the interviews but gave a more balanced assessment when reporting to Sugar?

Of course it makes sense... she was that bad at the interview stage, it was obvious she had just winged it through the GROUP tasks, sharing in others hardwork,

That they didn't even feel the need to be nasty about her, or highlight many weaknesses, because they knew she had no chance.

I don't think Joanna is stupid at all. She's less well-educated than many of the candidates and, although she runs her own company, her business experience is limited. Significantly, she doesn't have experience of job interviews. But that doesn't mean she lacks intelligence, and I think the tasks have shown her strengths.

Joanna proved better at all the basic business instincts than arguably anyone. She also mastered presenting and selling to different audiences over the series and she's got better at team work. Its a case of people not spotting whats there, as they rely on the superficials of accent and education. In this case education helps, but not without the raw instincts too.

If you want to find supposedly more intelligent people who made, obvious, wacking great, errors, you have to look no further than Shibby - who forgot that you can only sell what you can make - and Stella. Inputs and outputs ought to be familiar to a doctor and you don't get the job without masses of education. Stella went to Knightsbridge restaurants to buy something she was supposed to buy as cheaply as possible , ignored completely the price she had been given, ignored the colleague telling her to go somewhere else, and ignored her PMs instruction to check before committing to a price. Thats even more bizarre when her trade was city trading - where you would expect her to be able to spot a good price from a bad one. Its well up there with the one chicken per pizza.

The way I see it is that the reason she got the push was that she isn't "corporate" enough.

It's ironic that these suits who level it as a criticism of Stella that she is "corporate" while they are "entrepreneurial", that they cannot see past the fact that Joanna doesn't know that culture or speak that language, share the assumptions and mindset, and was out of her depth for those reasons.
I would expect nothing more, though, than this blinkered reaction from that shower of second-rate techy and managerial corporate business suits.

She was only out of her depth in the interviews because she had no experience of these.

That fact was known before they accepted her - it would have been obvious from her CV - so it was stupid to allow her onto the process if that was a deciding factor.

I don't think it was. It's something that someone of her innate intelligence could have learned very easily.

I think they honestly thought that her best course of action would be to expand her own business - which is why Sugar gave her that unprecedentedly up-beat firing.

Seems to me that many gobby contestants stay to keep the show interesting. Most should have been booted out much earlier than they actually were.

That's exactly what I think. Some are kept in because they are good and up for winning it and others are kept in because they are entertaining. Every series there is always one or two that you just know aren't going to win but they are kept in until nearer the end. It makes no difference which order they get fired as long as the ones he wants are there in the final and as he gets the complete say-so at the semi stage and doesn't have to rely on only choosing from the losing team, things can't go wrong.

That's a bit unfair. Shibby knew well he could only sell what was made. His plan was to make what he knew he could sell: to find out what the hotel wanted and then make it. He came a cropper because the production side didn't make it. He only found that out very late in the day; earlier on the phone they'd merely said it would be difficult. However, that phone call was enough for him to start turning down orders from other hotels because he knew they would stretch production too much. So, quite the reverse of making the mistake you attribute to him.

Though to be honest, he probably should have realised right at the start that the order he took wasn't realistic. And he could have turned down that later order in a more professional way.

Dunno - ask The Badger!

Not sure that was what happened? I got the impression (based on very little) that everyone liked Joanna and the interviewers got the point she had potential. They tested her and discovered she had no interview experience and no experience of big business but they saw her qualities. They seemed to find more wrong with Chris.

The people who ought to have backed Joanna were Karen, Nick and his Lordship who started from knowing what wasn't in the CV about what she could do on tasks. Karen jumped up to defend Chris. Nick seemed in old college tie mode again and defended the male with a posh accent yet again. Lord Sugar suddenly declared Joanna wasn't far enough along the learning curve to do what he wanted done.

Thats all very dubious, Nick and Karen stayed just as dumb when they should have be been pointing out what Liz could do and that Stuart was making no sense. Either they don't see much, or they just defend whatever decision LS has already made. Lord Sugar, again, ends up avoiding the person with real potential who needs more work and going for the safer option. Apprentice means middle manager and learning or potential isn't very important. Ls's only excuse this time is that he may think Chris did something uniquely smart - when he probably didn't. Again,as in previous years, his Lordship might as well have just gone by the CVs and application letters - as nothing that proved important couldn't have been discovered in 5 minutes looking there.

Claire

True - she's possibly the best example...

There's an lot of young people, quieter people and brash people who have the basic qualities to do very well, who never even get as far as Claire though. The people who might benefit most from being an apprentice and might have lots of potential arguably don't often get the title.. Thats partly the randomness of tasks, but partly because he keeps the Tre's and Stuarts on too long before rejecting them, and any academic females, for a safe option.

It's funny how the fact that we don't know if Chris's negotiation was just luck or based on actual knowledge has blinded us to another very important point.

If he made the decision based on a correct assessment of the information available it wasn't actually that shrewd. I don't mean that it was not correct but that it's something I'd expect anyone capable of a reasonable GCSE maths grade to be able to work out easily.

Because we don't know if he made the decision based on credible information and because we don't know if he really understood what he agreed to we've ignored the fact that even if he had good information and understood exactly what he'd offered (we never heard him give a reason for the 20% off the top) it was actually a very obvious decision to make.

It seems he's getting a great deal of kudos in some quarters for a fairly obvious business decision.

Over Claire...