Do Sir Alan wants a team player, does he?

What I think you are missing is that the rules are now changed. He wants a partner, not an Apprentice and since when have entrepreneurs such as him ever been team players.

Granted on these tasks working together has its place but he is looking for more than team players now. You see, the team players will go, labelled dull and uninspired and the one who have a bit of a spark, he will chose, even if they cause mayhem. It has happened several times before.

He wouldnt want total agreement as it isnt good TV, because that is the bottom line for the weekly programme

Next week looks like mixed teams and a trip down to the farm for organic fruit/ veg.

If the girls are so "girly girl" then I expect them squealing at the sight of piglets and freaking at the fact their high heel may get stuck in something cow related.

Btw, while you may see the beer task as male orientated, Zee was a non-drinker, and I think one of the other guys said he didn't drink beer. Maybe the task as a whole was unfair to both teams?

Thanks, I wondered what it would be but I hope against hope the girls get stuck in and dont let themselves down again.

But, if they mix the groups, it will be interesting how the men react towards them as if they fail, hopefully they wont blame it on the females because they failed previously.

Why dont they choose some determined girls who will just get on with the task but it shouldnt faze the Doctor lady, she should breeze it.

The girls failed because they couldn''t make the leap from the concept of a multipurpose cube to what it might look like and how it might work. Its true they then added ideas to it because everyone chipped in, and then subtracted them so there was nothing left. The big problem though was that no one could make the leap to seeing what it would look like quickly - so they couldn't finalise the concept, or see what was wrong with it to go to a new one. The boys didn't have that problem because Alex could visualise, draw and operationalise his idea and he had a better, convincing, grasp of what could work at the start. Thats nothing much to do with how the two teams work as a team, or how good they are at the follow on skills. Its all decided when none of the girls can tell the others what the thing should look like or do. Some would say thats because Alex has done woodwork, engineering and/or technical drawing, and none of the girls have . Others might argue even that its a classic right brain left brain or spatial intelligence or arts versus technology divide - the girls might not necessarily fall on one side of the divide, but this lot all seemed to

But look what I said.


Which is why they were unable to follow through with any kind of logic because there was no organisation, no real thought process , they all just flew shotgun and branded bits and pieces of ideas around until they had enough body parts to make a Frankenstein's monster.

No one actually got up and properly thought it all through,they just all talked over each other and the whole thing descended in to chaos. Too many egos clashing and the end result was that monstrosity on wheels!

We can't conclude that none of the women were capable of thinking it all through, from an idea to a real working product, because I am sure if there was some focus and critical thinking instead of all the bitching and whining, maybe someone would have stepped up and delivered but at the moment, it's all about trying to get one up on the other and put down the rest.

Sure LS is looking for an individual not a team, but you have to demonstrate that you can work as part of one, because that means you have to listen, you have to speak up when something isn't right, and you have to show solid leadership skills. You get that from working with a team. When you are run a business, you will be leading a team of employees, you have to show you can do that. Look how badly Natalie failed at that? Then the way she handled herself in the boardroom.

The reason for the women failing is because we have the worst bunch of females ever chosen to compete .

Compare them to 2011 when all the female candidates had degrees apart from one, won the first two tasks and had a female as a winning PM for the first four tasks. Of course that was also the year of the brilliant Helen Milligan, one of the best candidates ever on the Apprentice and far better then Tom Pellerau .

Yep, the big problem was they couldn't finalise the concept because the concept was crap and that they didn't have anything else. They took an all too common error in this day and age (more is more is more - nobody seems to have heard of the principle of diminishing returns) and ran with it. Product was a very big part of this task. I don't believe you had to have skills in woodwork, engineering or technical drawing to succeed but you did have to come up with a decent concept in the first place and the girls didn't. Therefore, as you said, any other skills they had were rendered inoperative.

A fairly good product can beat a very good one with better pitching and selling technique (likewise a decent one can beat a good one and so on), but a crap one is never going to beat a decent/good one however good the rest of the team's skills are. That said, as I've already implied, I don't think coming up with a decent product concept was beyond the skillset of any reasonable women's team; nor was it gender biased.

Not making beer: flavouring beer that had already been brewed; flavouring beer to make it more attractive to women. (And, incidentally, the boys' flavour was chosen by the design team back at base who did not actually taste anything.)

Not flat pack furniture but interior design. The teams needed to develop a concept. Detailed engineering could be left to the design studio.

So it can equally (and perhaps better) be argued that the tasks were biased against the men.

Where the women have created problems for themselves is in their refusal (it would be sexist to call it inability) to work as a team.

Teamwork means stepping in to help when a colleague is floundering around with simple arithmetic.

Teamwork means accepting the PM's ex officio authority whether or not you agree with any particular decision. For instance, if the market research team has doubts about the cube, it should not use the panel to undermine the cube or try to design an alternative product: rather, it should use market research to flesh out the concept, and determine what functions are most desired on each face of the cube.

Teamwork means a willingness to be led.

I don't think either gender is better at getting quantities right. If anything, the cliché would have the women to be better at it, as it's vaguely similar to cooking. We've seen this kind of task before: design a flavour, then scale it up. We've seen it with ice-cream and perfume.

If it's true that these women are bad at it, well, that's a shame, because in business and production you often need numeracy.


I don't think it was because he was a man. It was a particular skill held by one individual. They got lucky he was on their team.

Also, I think you are doing the women down somewhat. The physical implementation of their product was good. It all slotted together without glue or nails, and was easy to assemble. Their problem was at a higher level. Even there, they understood that making room for feet so you could sit at it, would take away from room for storage space. They weren't completely rubbish. They just didn't have a good, coherent idea. That can happen to any team, of any sex, in any subject. Again, if anything they ought to have had an advantage, in that straight men aren't traditionally keen on interior design.


It's not just about who wins the task. Arguably Lord Sugar learns more from how they deal with failure and things going wrong, than he does from their success. In the beer task, the PM was fired partly because he saw things going wrong and didn't fix them. In the design task, the PM wasn't fired despite how bad the product was. She survived partly because she had the nous to identify Sophie as the weak link. Assessing which of your underlings you least need is an important business skill.

Great discussion and posts here from networkbabe and several others. Many insights, different angles and ways of looking at it. If only that fool programme You're Fired did something useful like have a decent discussion of issues like this thrown up by the programme. We seem to get from Sugar, the Apprentice itself and that ghastly Fired prog an enjoyment of stereotyping, sneering and showing up women as nasty, bickering etc. Is this what they are selected for, along with their looks? So yes, I've always thought there is bias from the overall programme and its producers but on the question of these two particular tasks I am taking in the many different arguments on this thread.

I can see your argument but unfortunately far fewer people are interested in a programme that actually looks at what went wrong with the team's strategies, whether one team had an inherent advantage and what the teams could actually do to improve their performance (seriously rather than from a lol point of view) than are interested in a programme that looks at the problems faced/decent things done by each team for about - ooh - that long and spends the rest of the time ripping the sh*t out of the contestants. (I think that might be the longest sentence in the history of language - would anyone like to sponsor it so that I can pitch it to the semantics police?)

I actually rather like "You're Fired" but I do think there might be an audience for another analysis show that doesn't pitch to the lcd quite so obviously.

Oh dear, failed as a woman!

As I have argued in other threads, the balance on You're Fired just needs tweaking. Ditch the second comedian (or replace Dara) and replace the celebrity Apprentice fan with someone who can analyse the team dynamics or individual behaviour.

That way you have Dara to rip the p*ss out of the hapless contestant; the industry expert to say how it should have been done (say 5 minutes out of half an hour) and the team expert to point out that X relies in Y, A and B have a private feud but C and D are quietly competent (say another 5 minutes).

That still leaves two thirds of the programme for fun and comedy,

Under Adrian Chiles, You're Fired was closer to this, not because Adrian was a better host than Dara but because now there are two comedians where back then there was only one.

Bit chicken and egg though. No one could stand up and say this is what we should do. It does this, . it works like this, it relies on a (insert technogable) to enable it to revolve, it looks like this, here is a picture. At that point its pretty inevitable that lots of people will say the sketchy idea they have should do A to Z, and as no one has any idea how to make it even do A to C. And as no one knows how it works, no one can stand up and say this is a silly idea so it goes on until it turns out as a silly idea. I don't think that was that suprrising - particularly as soon as their only idea started talking about moving surfaces around or in and out of a cube. That requires spatial imagination, which I can't do, and I doubt if most of the population understand how something like a rubiks cube works.

If you look at it that way, they flounder because they have no ability to progress further. You may be right in that that someone might have come up with a partial, working idea for something better that did E to G, biut we didn't see anyone get that far. The smarter people and market research came up with contradictory ideas. And even if someone has a smarter idea and were heard, its not obvious that anyone could present it clearly enough to convince anyone else. The males had a much better idea, presented fully, and enough of them saw it was a better idea .

The males don't really work as a team - they tend to obey the male logic that challenging fellow alpha males (or people who think they are alpha males) too openly tends to end up in being maimed, and the game logic that following a great idea to a win is a good idea. Some bare their teeth at each other because they can't help it, and some calculate that even if the strong idea proves to be a dud, the guy who led them over the cliff will get fired anyway. The girls just have nothing much to follow, identify subtribes led by the stronger individuals, and so end up wandering around in different directions, snarling and scratching at each other, and looking for someone to blame for the mess they are in. Give the girls an obviously good idea and the boys a series of obviously bad ones though and I am not sure that things don't reverse.

The lads had a working item that while probably needing another session in the workshop as it looked a bit wobbly was 90% of the way there, but the girls just seemed to spend so long that they invented a box with wheels that reminded me of a 1990's IBM server (and a crap one at that it was)

Over the years i've noticed that the ladies always seem to try to be too hard to be the alpha female but once a few men are in the group it seems to cause the dynamics to change and suddenly their skills show through but you need a better ration than 7:1 for the poor guy to stand a chance

All that might be true but really was not the problem, which is that Natalie does not know how to run a brainstorming session, so the girls just randomly shouted ideas, all of which were accepted. Contrast this with what the boys did, where each presented an idea, one was accepted and then developed.

If the women had used the boys' approach, it would have been immediately obvious where they went wrong, which was adding the wheels.

Once they added the wheels, it lost most of its advantages because top and bottom were fixed. All functions that depended on free rotation of the cube were ruled out by the wheels.

The women could then have either removed the wheels and gone back to the cube, or ditched the cube in favour of properly developing the box on wheels, or moved on to something else completely.

That was their problem, not lack of engineering knowhow which was provided by the design studio.

I agree. The badly conducted brainstorm was a major reason they lost.

Even the guys awful chair with holes for recycling was a concept based on a piece of furniture. All the girls had was "cube".

If the girls were going down the "not reinventing the box" route, they could've made it somewhat unique, like the US task where one team had it with kiddy paints and stickers and the kids could make it their own creation. Hmm slot together box, for storage in kids rooms, with craft type stuff for kids to do on it... they might have won. That makes me wonder was another flaw of the girls looking for something that they would want in their tiny flat, and ignoring a bigger market?

It might of worked for a £20 cube but for £75 i'd want more than a couple of pages of stickers and a pot of paint

It's still worth £20 more than their idea then.

Seriously though, I think the brainstorm would've been better off this time if they identified a key market (say families), rather than "It's what I'd like".

I don't see a gender bias, personally. When a task relies heavily on brain power, group co-operation (listening and communication wise), correct application of skills and a sense of unity then achievement odds are going to be higher in tasks. In real life I see girls and women can do this, so don't know why in The Apprentice it appears harder (or has at least been edited in that way).

Right now some of the girls (Luisa and Uzma in particular) don't seem to understand these key elements of this yet, for whatever reason. I think some of the other girls, i.e. Rebecca, Leah and maybe to some extent Francesca are showing the understanding of this better, and so I don't think all the girls can be lumped into one dire group just because their team have yet to win. Rebecca and Leah have shown they can still perform and have sells to show for (despite some of some of their difficult team members not making things easy).

Precisely this ^

It looks like from an engineering point of view the girls did a better job since their product fit together very well whilst the boys’ chair was a bit on the high side. Though how much of this was down to the people making the blueprints on computer or the prototype is hard to tell.

But where the girls really failed was from an aesthetic point of view, their cube looked awful compared to the boys’ chair. When it comes to furniture the visual appeal will often be more important that practical use or comfort. Some of the great chair designs from the 20th century are not all that comfortable to sit on.
Stereotypically this was something less suited to men as they are meant to not be interested in anything like interior design.