But its not largely about negotiation.That team won on negotiation. Its often about research, general knowledge, and travel organisation - which is often largely luck. And its about who you try to negotiate with, and how keen they are to sell, or be on TV - which is also largely luck. It may be about how sexually attractive you are , or whether you have magic powers, like JIm, if it gets close - but those factors may not work in the real world anyway. Its also about whether you buy tatty sinks, or new, used once, rope thats as thin as cord.- and, crucially, it matters if you find an online trader, or buy a diamond that may not be the same quality as anything the other team are offered. .

Thats difficult enough - without telling them they have to interpret what happens in his Lordships's brain. Whats in there is unknowable - and changes week on week - as quality matters or doesn't, certain qualities get you praised or fired, and past PMs have been sacked for taking either of the options on offer to them, There is no clear rule that says a tatty cracked sink is OK , but some types of skeleton are not. As it is, a bunch of flowers with two flowers, or a filled canape with no filling, is acceptable - but an extra 70 cm of rope is not. And ,with the skeleton, there is no saying what someone who asks for a skeleton may want. They might want a bone one. or a plastic one, or a wood one, or a metal one, or a paper/paper mache/cardboard one. They might want to assemble it, or give it as a gift to someone to assemble . They might even want to learn anatomy by assembling it.

The only way out of that is if they have seen previous series, and know what he wanted, or got, before , or they assume he will think of the oldest form, he saw in Carry On Doctor, and get that. But that assumes they can second guess him - which he tells them is impossible = or they have seen the show before If he wants something, and wants to exclude the kit form - that most skeletons will now come in- he has to specify he wants it assembled. If he doesn't want one made of anything but bone or plastic, he has to specify that too.

Skelly for the win.

Did I say when constructed? I said WHAT THEY SUPPLIED, which was not constructed. If I asked for a house I would expect it to come constructed. So basically you are flat out wrong in your response. Congratulations back at you.

And I don't give a stuff what it says on the box, paper would not make an anatomically correct skeleton unless you've got some seriously messed up bones.

But it says 'Anatomical Skeleton'. An 'anatomical skeleton' is what it is, an 'anatomical skeleton' i.e. something that is an actual skeleton or moulded artificially to be a working model of a real skeleton. Something that has the accurate shaping, diameter, curvature etc.

An 'anatomically accurate' cardboard model of a skeleton is not an 'anatomical skeleton' at all. It would not be allowed to advertise itself as such.

Sugar said it was a negotiation task, but it wasnt.

The winning and losing team was decided on who had bought the items for the least amount (and then adjusted with added fines for lateness and incorrect/missing items).

It was added up the total amount they had spent and thats what decided the winning team.

If it was a negotiations task, as sugar had emphasised at the briefing, then it shouldve came down to who negotiated the most percentage off the price of the items.

Imagine this scenario: team A went to a diamond dealer and he quoted them £60 but they bargained down to £55.

Team B went to a diamond dealer and he quoted them £100 but they bargained him down to £60.

In this challenge team A would've been more sucessful because they spent less. But if it was a real negotiation task, then team B wouldve been more sucessful because they managed to negotiate a better discount.

This task was all over the place. Intended as a negotiation task but ultimately came down to who spent the least. The added skeleton decision just made the whole thing worse.

Let's imagine for one moment a different scenario in which Daniel and Fillipe had purchased a real human skeleton for let's say £1500. In the middle of Lord Sugar's ensuing rant about how they managed to spend over 6 times more than the other team I dare say Fillipe might have ventured to point out they had bought a real skeleton rather than the plastic skeleton purchased by the other team.

Lord Sugar's reply would no doubt have been along the lines of: "I don't care if the bleedin' skeleton was made of bleedin' bone, bleedin' plastic or bleedin' solid bleedin' gold, it was the bleedin' price that was important. The bleedin' rules at no bleedin' time said you had to get a bleedin' real human skeleton".

Sorry but that's just flat-out wrong.

If the task had been scored on the basis of what discounts were achieved, you'd be right.

As it was, all that they did was decide a winner on the basis of who spent the least, once various penalties had been applied.

It might actually be a very good idea for a task to see who could get the biggest discounts but that wasn't what happened here.

*EDIT*

Beaten to it by Tt88. Sorry for the duplication.

The semantic contortions and dubious "analogies" that seem to be the only way to "argue" that the skeleton shouldn't have been accepted have convinced me that it should have been.

Meanwhile, on the Radio Time website, a recent poll asked "Was Lord Sugar right to disallow the flat pack skeleton?". 89% said "No".

That's because the whole thing has been dumbed down for television. Trying to explain the whole discounting thing on tv show would be too complicated. So they go for who spends the least.

Doesn't seem like it'd be terribly hard to add up the total value of the asking-prices for the items, add up what they spent and use those two figures to calculate the discount achieved by each team.

Diamond
Asking price: £100
Purchase price: £60

Skeleton
Asking price: £260
Purchase price: £210

Rope
Asking price £2
Purchase price: Free

Ood oil
Asking price: £80
Purchase price: £45

Total Value: £100 + £260 + £2 + £80 = £442
Total paid: £60 + £210 + £0 + £45 = £315
Total discount: £127
% of total value: 28.73%

That's NOT what was asked for or what was done to decide who won though.
Instead, they decided on a winner simply on the basis of who spent the least, which means attempting to buy a £15 paper skeleton rather than a £300 plastic one was a worthwhile gamble, especially since the specifications were unclear.

What Felipe did was very bad business practice. He tried to rip his customer off with a questionable interpretation of the spec. You can only do that once, that customer never comes back.

What's so questionable about it?

That it was made of paper, rather than plastic? (Plastic was evidently acceptable.)

The it wasn't already assembled?

The fines weren't arbitrary. They were the retail price plus £50 in both cases. Why should Sugar have been gunning for Felipe when he'd been doing quite well in previous tasks?

What was questionable was that they knew what Sugar wanted and tried to get away with a low cost substitute. In real business that's not a strategy that works for long.

Had they assembled the model then that might have been accepted. But it's still not a good idea to nickle and dime customers in real life.

The skeleton looks pretty good imo, and if they had put it next to the resin one, it would have raised questions about what comprises a skeleton. http://www.peeks.co.uk/productimages...085CB902AA.jpg

But in the end it comes down to a bit of psychology, and it never seemed to me in the least likely that LS would accept a pack of press-out paper bits and pieces, any more, as I said before, than he would have accepted the resin skeleton if it had come as a box of loose bones and a coil of wire. People will obviously never agree on this - 240 posts in - but I would have been amazed if he had said, yes, that counts, no problem.

With their spare hour I would love to have seen all four of them frantically trying to assemble it though.

You keep describing it in ways such as "press-out paper bits and pieces" that leave out the very relevant fact that the pieces were representations of bones, and would join up to form a complete skeleton. They weren't random pieces, as if someone had chucked in a jigsaw of a Constable landscape and then thrown in some pieces of a pizza box.

In a poll on the Radio Times website, 89% thought Lord Sugar got it wrong.

So they were mind-readers?

I don't think that getting an unassembled skeleton kit would be to "nickle and dime customers". You know that such kits are sold, right? Do you think everyone who buys one has been cheated?

It does look good. But some parts of the finished thing are obviously 2D. The parts that look 3D cannot be as accurate as a moulding. There's no way that skeleton could be used for anatomical study. Which means it is not an "anatomical skeleton" as per spec.

The whole team knew that Felipes idea was not what Sugar really wanted but that it might fit the given spec. This was clearly shown in the programme. No mind reading necessary.


My post, which you quoted, was in reply to someone who said it showed good business sense. I don't think it is good practice to sell a customer a kit of parts when they want the complete item.

Yes I do know that such kits are sold. It was shown in the programme apart from anything else. What is your point? And why all the confused smilies?

Yes, because the Radio Times readers know it all, don't they?

It drove me mad, Sugar had no idea what he was talking about. What was the other skeleton made of? Plastic? That's no more authentic than paper. Unless you define an authentic skeleton as something that used to have skin on it, it's no good disallowing ones that don't match your unspecified expectations. That and the bloke selling old sinks who told the second group what he'd charged the first group really made a mess of the episode.

I thought it was a stroke of genius on Felipe's part .

Felipe got his customer Lord Sugar a skeleton for £14, how did he rip him off?

The point being made is that they knew what Sugar really wanted (we know this because all 4 weren't sure Sugar would go for it, but Daniel and Felipe thought it was worth the gamble)

It is akin to LS asking for a silver cloche and you bringing a chrome one because it's cheap, does the same job and looks almost the same.

But it wasn't what he wanted.

Also I still don't agree that paper is anatomically correct, you couldn't put your hand round the paper bone and feel exactly what the bone would feel like in your hand as you could with the plastic one. That to me is what is meant by anatomically correct.

You're saying it can't be anatomically correct because it's made of paper? what a stupid thing to say

http://img.xcitefun.net/users/2009/1...culpture-2.jpg