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Helen, Tom and Susan ... who else? |
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#26 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Quote:
It is not sufficient to throw a good idea into the ring like Cassandra, expecting others to support it and implement it.
In the run-up to 2007 plenty of persons prophesied an impending meltdown thanks to the way UK was piling up sky-high credit card debts borrowing against alleged house values. The Cassandras failed to make themselves understood by a wider public and thus failed to influence the course of events. A prophet only needs to pronounce an idea, then to claim credit after the event. But Susan was a part of the team so her ideas should have been taken on board. She was not armed so she could not force her team mates to take notice. Quote:
A leader is needed to implement it, and persist in the face of opposition.
And when Susan was a leader everyone said she was very good. And she lead her team to victory.Quote:
Susan was always waiting for rescue by the Seventh Cavalry.
When someone (i.e. Susan) says something and someone else lies about it (i.e. Jim), there is no way to break the impasse unless there was a witness (i.e. Nick) to clear the matter up.It wasn't a matter of Susan waiting for the cavalry. It was a matter of there being and independent witness. |
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#27 |
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Nottingham, UK
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Quote:
But Susan was a part of the team so her ideas should have been taken on board.
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And when Susan was a leader everyone said she was very good. And she lead her team to victory.
Her team performed terribly, just scraping a win despite the other team only getting 60% of the items. She made big mistakes, such as not walking away from the tea deal, and her team didn't seem to follow her guidelines on location. She wasn't a bad PM, but she wasn't great either. She was just lucky the other team happened to be marginally worse.She didn't get much criticism from her team partly because she won. Had she lost, it would have been a different story. |
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#28 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Joanna was better. And in my opinion one of the best ever. She had the bright ideas for every single task. I cant remember a single good one from any of the present candidates. No the BBC havent come up with good ones this time.
as much as i liked joanna, she was just rubbish at the interviews.and her 'beach book reader' idea was the worst idea ive seen on the show. she did well though. |
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#29 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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How can you say that. Boots liked it. There was no better idea. She 'fell' at the interviews because she realised then that she had been duped and never had a chance to start with. On every single task she seemed to be the 'brains'. Liz had to go and even copy her ideas and never seemed to put a foot wrong. LS also liked her. Even now after the show she seems to be the most in the news. Being called to speak everywhere. All the others have been long forgotten.
About the present series. I think that in almost every task the other team if you go by effort should have won. The last task which was based on who had the bigger market gap Jim should have won. The previous one they didnt get the laid out contracts and still managed on their own to get as much - £6 The buying task they paid less for the articles and had less time for it. |
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#30 |
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Quote:
Her ideas are taken on board, when they are good ones and she argues passionately for them. Usually either she's wrong, or else she doesn't bother to make her case.
Her team performed terribly, just scraping a win despite the other team only getting 60% of the items. She made big mistakes, such as not walking away from the tea deal, and her team didn't seem to follow her guidelines on location. She wasn't a bad PM, but she wasn't great either. She was just lucky the other team happened to be marginally worse. She didn't get much criticism from her team partly because she won. Had she lost, it would have been a different story. You don't give her enough credit. |
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#31 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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Even now after the show she seems to be the most in the news. Being called to speak everywhere. All the others have been long forgotten.
![]() Also being in the news a lot is a bad sign, as this means that you ain´t got a proper job (Liz for instance has snatched a top financial job and is therefore totally gone from the news headlines). Quote:
About the present series. I think that in almost every task the other team if you go by effort should have won.
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#32 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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I would only agree with you on the apps task and the pet food task.[/quote]
So between the two of us thats the lot! |
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#33 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Quote:
Susan was a fantastic PM, Nick, who barely praises anyone, said that she was great and 'a little force to be reckoned with'. She was very organised and succinct. Shame they didn't have the internet available for them to google the real price of tea.
You don't give her enough credit. Susan's team did say, quite enthusiastically, that she was a good PM. Without a doubt the two she brought back into the boardroom would have changed their tune but that's true for every PM. As you say, if you deny people the means to research efficiently they are likely to get the prices of unusual items spectacularly wrong. The main problem with Susan's team on the buying task was that they ignored her instruction on where to start looking. Once again she nailed a very important factor but was ignored. Unless she had tried to micro manage the team she couldn't have known that they were looking in the wrong places and if she had done that she would have no doubt got no end of stick for it. |
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#34 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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So between the two of us thats the lot!
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#35 |
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Join Date: May 2011
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I agree with this post. But I'm surprised no one has said Jim for the interviews. He seems to be a great talker and I think he can charm his way through... thoughts?
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#36 |
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I agree with this post. But I'm surprised no one has said Jim for the interviews. He seems to be a great talker and I think he can charm his way through... thoughts?
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#37 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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Quote:
Edward, Gavin and Felicity were great PM's
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#38 |
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Join Date: Dec 2010
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Tom hasn't been PM yet and Helen and Melody haven't faced Lord Sug yet, so, I don't think these three are clear and dry yet.
I really hope Tom is PM in the next task, he should be as he it would seem strange for two former PM's to get the gig again when he hadn't yet. I would like Tom and Melody as PM next week because then we can become familiar with Melody again and see if Tom is actually up to more than just what we've seen of him so far. |
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#39 |
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That was not my point. My point was that the teams on the losing side every time worked harder and better with a lot more effort.
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#40 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Having just looked at a clip on the BBC website that shows Susan asking some questions about the French I'm beginning to wonder about her:
Do the French like their children? Do they drive in France? plus: I know nothing about French culture (stated as if "and why on Earth would I" should have been tagged onto the end). I would have thought that it was just something amusingly taken out of context but there is a clip of Karen absolutely steaming about the 'do they like their children' comment. |
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#41 |
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Join Date: Apr 2005
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The last task which was based on who had the bigger market gap Jim should have won.
Jim made a fundamental mistake in not negotiating on the first pitch. The point of an agency is that they get a cheaper price than the clients would get directly - that's their business model, how they are able to money. He also got the tone of the magazine cover wrong,, and made the articles too patronising. It doesn't matter how big the market gap is when his product doesn't match it. |
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#42 |
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Join Date: Apr 2005
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Susan was a fantastic PM, Nick, who barely praises anyone, said that she was great and 'a little force to be reckoned with'. She was very organised and succinct. Shame they didn't have the internet available for them to google the real price of tea.
It's not true that Nick never praises anyone. He has his likes and dislikes; he's not as neutral as he should be. She wasn't organised enough to get the list price of the tea, or to get a second supplier, and she didn't understand the task well enough to know she should walk away instead of paying over the odds. She gave her team instructions but apparently never checked that they were being followed. It's not micro-managing to check that your team is going in the right direction. I actually rate her fairly highly. It only seems like I don't because I am forever arguing with people who rate her far too highly, leading me to point out that she's far from perfect. |
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#43 |
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Join Date: Dec 2008
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In terms of the buying task, there was an important piece of the puzzle missing in terms of discovering why they only won by £6. Susan and Felicity between them messed up the tea, but that was only half the story. The other half is who messed up on purchasing toilet roll in bulk, which was one of the more expensive items on the task, and therefore should have been a top priority. We were never shown this, despite it being important.
I don't think she was a great PM, or a terrible one, but a major part of the team's weakness is occluded from view. She might be better or worse than she appeared to be. |
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#44 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Quote:
She wasn't organised enough to get the list price of the tea, or to get a second supplier, and she didn't understand the task well enough to know she should walk away instead of paying over the odds.
If she didn't know the list price of the tea then she couldn't have known to walk away. If she had enough information to walk away then she must have been organised enough to get the price. It is, anyway, unclear whether it was necessarily certain that you could get to more than one supplier of some of the items. When you have only telephone directories to use you are limited to phoning suppliers one at a time to try and find one that sells what you want. Maybe there were only a couple of suppliers of that type of tea out of a hundred tea merchants. It seems odd that someone who was evidently very well organised should simply not have tried to get more than one supplier. Quote:
She gave her team instructions but apparently never checked that they were being followed. It's not micro-managing to check that your team is going in the right direction.
It would have been interesting to see how that panned out in the boardroom had they lost. Personally I don't think a manager (who, we must remember Sugar expects to be working as well as managing) should have to check that some of the supposedly 'brightest business minds in the country' can follow extremely basic instructions.Quote:
I actually rate her fairly highly. It only seems like I don't because I am forever arguing with people who rate her far too highly, leading me to point out that she's far from perfect.
Most of the people who may be going a little too far on the pro Susan side are probably doing so because of the weird level of hatred she is generating.At one point yesterday I counted seven anti-Susan threads on the front page! That's just absurd. And this outpouring of opprobrium and resentment seems to have been engendered because she said 'It's unfair' a couple of times (amplified by the vicious edit she's had on occasion.) |
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#45 |
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She seems to be extremely well organised and quite unflappable. She gets straight to the crux of the matter and deals with it. I think it is her no nonsense, get the job done, approach that has led to her not appearing in the earlier edits; she simply didn't cock up!
I reckon she'd be unflappable and well-spoken in the boardroom along the lines of Kristina and Stella. |
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#46 |
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Helen, Tom and Melody are the only ones not to have been in the boardroom (in Helen's case its because she hasent lost). But I think if both Tom and Helen were in the boardroom, they would be eaten alive.
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#47 |
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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In the Irish Apprentice a couple of years ago there was a woman who had been on the winning team something like 11 times in a row. The first time she was in the boardroom she got sacked!
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#48 |
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Join Date: Apr 2005
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In the second UK series, Paul had 6 wins out of 10, including both times as PM, and stayed out of the boardroom when he lost, so the interviews round was the first time Lord Sugar got to talk with him properly. He was summarily fired.
In the American version, some of the winning treats are a meal with Trump. Although a bit lame, I think they are a good thing to give the winners a chance to spend some time with the boss. You can't win if Sugar doesn't know who you are. |
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#49 |
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Join Date: Dec 2008
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Lee won handily despite never having been in the Final Boardroom. Tim, Simon, Yasmina and Michelle all wound up there only once. I don't think never, or hardly ever being in the Final Boardroom has ever been a hindrance for anyone. Every single Final Two has been won by the person with fewer Boardroom appearances.
I don't think Paul's problem is that he was never in the Boardroom - his problem was that he tanked interviews harder than anybody else in the history of the programme. His CV was awful, he antagonised every single interviewer, and told Siralan he didn't care if he got fired, because he'd just go and get a job somewhere else. He made sure that hiring him would have been a PR disaster, and a nonsense. I doubt that getting to argue over the toss regarding a loss would have helped him out - he probably would just got fired sooner. |
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#50 |
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It wasn't based on who had the bigger market gap. I strongly suspect that the teams were given a list of themes, and if the task was merely about who could pick from that list the theme with the biggest market gap, the task need only take five minutes.
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