Simon fitted the buyers for the job on offer his series. Not sure if the last task made any difference to LAS's choice as Kristina didn't.

The problem with the logic of Tom winning is that the idea (and his patent on it) wins. That gives the victory to the backroom boy with an idea that exists on day one. Everything that follows in the series doesn't matter. it doesn't matter if Tom can't sell, can't motivate, can't make choices and can't manage because all he needs is the idea - and if it exists beforehand all he needs to do is hand it over and retreat to a office somewhere.

Here its messier. He can test whether people are any good in their own fields and capable of running their business rather than just handing over a design. However he's not doing it in any convincing way. There's a lot of people who went home for reasons that were contrived or irrelevant to what they had on offer or who were just not articulate or well educated or functioning in their own language enough to survive the boardroom,. Bili was difficult - but there was no reason at all to judge her proposal from what we saw. Maria might have had a great chance of running a bigger restaurant. Both went because he didn't want to deal with them - which shouldn't be crucial judging a proposa or abilityl. Laura looked prettty good under difficult circumstances - and selling modern art wasn't relevant to anything much. Katie came up with some of the better ideas of the series. Jenna wouldn't be making videos for her business plan either. They all seem to have been judged differently to Tom from 2011 - -whose bigger errors were ignored - and their ability to do whats actually necessary for this prize hasn't been assessed either.

Meanwhile, Tom, Jade, Adam, Ricky. Gabi and Stephen have all made mistakes that raise significant questions about their ability to manage anything. The result is that who is still there doesn't have that much credibility. He's firing some people on weaker versions of the arguments he used on past series amd may be keeping others on the arguments he applied to Tom alone last series - and this time he's got no candidate like Helen with a good record but he has a whole line of people who might have gone on what they have shown. Its a story without much logic, with curtailed sub stories and no heros. .

but surely in the same vein no one invests 250k in a hare brained scheme that has no chance of working.

Sure. That's why Tom's "chair" plan was rejected last year.

The caveat is that better candidates will likely have better plans. It makes a lot of sense for the show to include a detailed evaluation of the plans as a formal, on-screen part of the process, and use it to judge the candidates. That now happens instead of the interview round. It happens on-screen towards the end of the series, not off-screen before it starts.

But he would have seen that in his CV if the prize was a job too. If anything, an inventor is more valuable as an employee than as a business partner, so Sugar would have been even more keen to keep him in under the old format.

I don't think Tom was ever the reason for a team losing last year. In fact he often identified what was going wrong but was never listened to. Even though he was a bad PM, Melody fed him false market research information which undermined the team. This whole theory about the business plan deciding the winner before the show starts is based purely on whether people think Tom deserved to win or not.

I think it's reasonable to assume that Sugar identified Tom as a possible winner before the show started, and that his business plan sorted him out from the complete no-hopers, along with possibly giving him a "get out of jail free" card when he lost as PM.

However, based on Sugar's comments throughout last season, I think he actually identified a small group of people who'd set up their own businesses, and Tom just happened to emerge as the most suitable of them. Leaving aside what I said about Susan earlier, the most successful and experienced businesspeople out of last year's batch of candidates were in fact Gavin and Zoe. If Sugar was going to identify a winner before the show started and totally ignore all the results, I'd have thought one of those two would win. I think he was also holding out some hope for Melody as well, but the "reinvestment" task ended up being her downfall, and actually ended up proving that Tom did know what he was doing.

Agree Melody seemed to interest him - he had no idea what she was doing though. Zoe he did identify - but he sacked her for a not very convincing reason when Tom was the one who mucked up her product and Melody was the other one who could have gone. He may identify people for the top of his list, but I doubt if he could stop there. He said Tom's idea was a product which was what he knew about - so services started at a disadvantage. He's shown no interest in catering and Zoe's drink business was far less familar to him than selling something like Tom's file. Tom's was also on a scale that fitted. He should have been much more interested in Susan's plan, but she seems to have put him off at the stage she started talking about making millions and massive sums for product development began to be used as an argument against her. Something technological and cheap seems to have an advantage - although I can see him doing something like supporting Gabi's art gallery more than I can see him ever going for Maria's next restaurant or Laura's second bridal shop. You also have to wonder if he's interested in anything that would be happening in Scotland or the north or even the wilds of Kent where he can't pop by to see it easily.

Tom did pretty well mucking up the biscuit task by producing an inedible biscuit. Zoe effectively went home for relying on the designer amongst them to be able to design something that met the basic requirement of tasting alright.

Under the old format Lord Sugar had specific jobs in mind. Tom couldn't do any of those jobs - and there would have been no excuse to have him as a winner under the old format - even if he had had the elizir of life on offer, Michelle had experience of negotiating contracts internationally which was necessary for his plan that series - setting up an international network to buy, process and get a return from old computers. Simon alone could sell to people like Simon- which was the requirement his year, Selling TV screens to underground management was a job that fitted a blokish male like Lee, Stella's job would have been mindblowingly boring for Liz.

I agree. In fact, I'd say that he had more business acumen that most of the other candidates. Looking at his losses:

Week 1 - Made the point that they needed to look at margins and find prices based on that, not just pluck them out of the air, like Edward did.
Week 2 - Made the point that the app was going worldwide and that the market for their app was too narrow.
Week 3 - Didn't feature much, but Logic certainly didn't lose the task due to him - It was more due to Gavin's complete disorganisation.
Week 4 - Made the point right at the start that the treatment room was no-where near their selling stand - what happened? They got no sales for treatments because the treatment room was too far away from the sales stand.
Week 5 - Said that EveryDog wasn't niche enough and said that they shouldn't be too broad. This was the sole reason that they lost the task...
Week 8 - Wanted to go for the rucksack (which made up of the majority of Venture's sales) and told Leon and Melody to research La Redoute. Which they didn't do.
Week 9 - Made a nice design for the biscuit which was universally praised and mostly seen as the only positive aspect of the task.
Week 10 - Proved he could sell and told Melody to reinvest in the nodding dogs. Which she didn't do.

So, Tom was actually a strong candidate and his biggest issue was people around him ignoring him. His main problem was not forcing his point through, which wouldn't be a big issue if he was the boss of a company.

He also did the same, even when he won, such as criticising Natasha's Lad Mag, Yeah? idea and coming up with the successful branding of MyPy.

Dont forget that Melody also fed him false feedback in the France task so she could push her ideas.

He's an inventor, not a cook. One reason it didn't taste good was the half chocolate half plain idea, a team decision. Surely every candidate is allowed one task they do badly in.


If Tom's inventiveness had come up in an earlier series he could still have been a winner. Sugar would have simply given him a different job. Inventors are highly prized by technology companies. I think it's far more likely he positioned winners in his companies according to their attributes, rather than having a job-role in mind at the outset. Stella's job shows he had nothing in mind that year. Stella found it unsatisfactory too.

According to you, Sugar used to choose the winner based on the attributes required for the job he had in mind. If true, that's just as hidden from the viewer as him picking a winner based on the business plans presented. Also, with the same set of candidates and a different job role a different winner would emerge.