But at least Katie had some business acumen about her despite being a biyach. She was highly confident and was always capable of getting good results.

This year's lot are just like a bunch of Hollyoaks characters. I meet more professional people than this shower every day!

Plus, Katie would eat the lot of them for breakfast. She was just in a different league!

Yes I agree with you. In fact I couldn't have put it better myself (especially the Hollyoaks analogy hehe)

What we saw here was a dose of sales narcissm backfiring and they got what they deserved as well.

This happens when the sales people start beleiving that the sucess of a project is solely down to themselves and their selling skills rather than the quality of the product and effort of other team members.

Jennifer and Lindi had convinced themselves that they were going to win and that win was down to themselves alone.

When it came to the boardroom I'm betting that Jennifer must have decided to try and grab the credit for the win rather than it going to Lucinda. Possibly expecting LIndi to join in with her (remember her comments the night before).

However this backfired on her big style when it turned out they had lost and Lindi didn't back her up. She should have gone, but I guess this along with the 24 hour laundry hotline had showed Sir Alan that Lindi was naive in business.

There is no way that Jennifer should have gone in preference to Lucinda.

Jenny did do a good job and it was not apparent to me what Lucinda did except organise the personnel into teams, the only things really demanding thing that needed organising was the strategy for obtaining the sales leads and Lucinda did not organise that or even offer guidance, she was effectively irrelevant.

Jenny actually seems to do things, even if she did get carried away. Too often in this world it is the doers who receive more criticism than those people who avoid the spotlight by doing very little.

Lindi wasn't just naive, she was thick and delusional and inept in the extreme and utterly incompetent.

LOl , I have to laugh at the overreaction on here. Jennifer did just one thing wrong and came across badly but now she's being compared to Katie who to my knowledge wished death on her fellow contestants and repeatedly insulted their backgrounds and bitched horribly about them to the cameras and to their faces was mean and personal.

Hi there.

I made reference to Katie but it was more a general impression of this year's girls that led me to compare them to her as opposed to Jennifer alone.

I agree with you to an extent but I feel it is down to the editing too. I'm absolutely sure that the accusation could be applied to all the girls last year too had they been edited to come across that way as Ghazal got involved in Katie's bitching often , Natalie was picking on Adam to an extent and Jadine came across as agressive from what we saw of them. Also , Kristina also did several things that came across like Jen did last night , the sweets incident , the kissogram service when she completely overruled Sophie and when she brought out Katie's personal life in the boardroom and I'm positive that as a result of editing any of them could have taken Katie's role.

Well take a look at the other team and see what happens with bad management! Market research in a pub. Only 2 leads. How they won is beyond me.

Why did Lucinda's team lose? 3 out of the 6 leads were dud. The exclusivity deals would have lost them the task regardless. Neither of those were Lucinda's responsibility.

Organising personnel into teams seems to be quite important to me.

There's a new "bitch" every week, this week they targeted Jennifer. She seems completely normal to me. Lucinda was being childish; "it's the looks you give", that was ridiculous and petty. They are all trying desperately hard to find and exploit any weakness in anybody.

Another thing, off-topic, I noticed is the change in Helene. Two weeks ago it was "I'm all for team work, getting along with the team and moving forward" yet last week she purposely pushed all the blame on Lucinda. There are a lot of bad seeds this series, but last night's episode was brilliant! The lazy team won, which made the boardroom very gripping IMO.

Jennifer shold certainly have gone.
If she's as fantastic a salesperson as she thinks she is she would never in a million years have agreed to unconditional exclusivity.
She doesn't know as much as she likes to make out. It wasn't a mistake - it was professional suicide.

She's a sell at all costs and make my figures look good type, with no thought for the effect on the business. Nobody needs a salesperson who loses you money.
She thinks people will go to a cinema just so that they can buy the ice-cream?

Watching her in the boardroom really illustrated the expression 'chewing a wasp'.

Agree

That's exactly what her role is. Her role is to organise the team and allocate tasks to the appropriate people. She chose the best sales people to do the selling and on the first day wanted to be where the most crucial part at the time was, the making of the product, whilst in the second day wanted to change the teams so that each team would have had someone involved with making the product and someone in the marketing/sales team. The PM's role is NOT to do everything themselves, otherwise it would be Sir Alan installing your Sky box.

AntiInternet says he thinks Lucinda was being childish when she said she got "non-verbal queues", but again, this was part of her role, all it proved is that she was very perceptive. Jenny did in fact bitch and moan in the taxi afterwards that she didn't want to have the teams changed, ironically for the very childish reason that she had "worked so hard for the leads". She had worked hard, but the goal was to get the best deals for the farm not to massage her ego. Lucinda correctly assumed that Jenny would have a problem with this and it could cause her to perform badly out of spite, so she made the decision to keep the teams intact as they would work better that way.

Lindie had been playing at being a businesswoman from the beginning. She acted like a child pretending to be an adult, superficially copying what she saw around herself but not actually understanding anything that was going on. Her comment that she was more PM than Lucinda having not even been involved with any of the production or decision making highlighted this. And selling icecream to icecream makers? Jesus, talk about selling water to a drowning man.

Organising personnel is important, but it wasn't difficult in this case. She had little else to do, and Jennifer is clearly more competent in a whole range of skills, as well as being more intelligent, self-aware, articulate, priority conscious, focussed and driven.

Doubt if the farmer will be so accommodating of Jennifer's 'one mistake,' when he considers his lost sales due to her exclusivity deal.

I think Jennifer didn't come across well, but I don't think she is a complete and utter bitch like the likes of Claire, Jenny and Alex. She came across as being really defensive and tough to me, rather than bitchy/evil/malicious.

I agree with Sir Alan's decision to fire Lindi as well. Yes, Jennifer did bring the exclusivity up out of the blue, but Lindi used it herself afterwards. If she had spoken against the exclusivity or even kept quiet about it she might have stayed, but she actually used it herself to sell the ice cream. That makes her equally as responsible, so I didn't like how she tried to put all of the fault on Jennifer.

Maybe she made it look 'not difficult'? Certainly other people seem to make it look difficult. In fact practically every week.

As for Jennifer being self-aware.... she didn't seem to realise that she was coming across with as a cold ice queen. I agree she was driven.... but driving headlong into trouble. Didn't like them celebrating their victory before the result either. I didn't notice Lucinda doing that.

I am not saying she is the worst candidate... just that I can't see why Lucinda should have got fired before her. I think the right one went out of the 3. The 24 hour hotline for laundry just demonstrated Lindi was on a different planet.

Lucinda did not organise the team except in personnel, and that wasn't a difficult task, a fact which you seem to be ignoring, but she still managed to make a big mistake, she put the neuron-free, delusional beautician in charge of the sales team, how stupid was that? And it cost her.

Lucinda did no other organising of the team besides personnel that I could see from the footage. A project manager has several responsibilities and organising the personnel is but one, and she abdicated from the others.

Well it wasn't a difficult task to allocate personnel and it had little effect on the project because of the nature of the task. Claire demonstrated on the other team that the personnel decisions and bad project management on a task of this nature was not critical, she was utterly incompetent yet her team, more through luck than competence, was successful.

Jennifer is generally self-aware, hence her well mannered social interactions, but perhaps she may not be fully aware of the impression her competence has on incompetent numbskulls, she is probably used to being surrounded by semi-competent people who are not intimidated by a business focussed approach. This ice queen issue is minor and irrelevant and is simply an angle her detractors seem to be using for lack of anything of substance to criticise her for. Lucinda is so downbeat she doesn't celebrate anything, so she didn't this time, and she is so busy empathising with the distress of others she doesn't get on and achieve anything.

totally agree with this - it's shaming!

I think if I had to work with her - I'd quit. She's truly awful, no sense of team work, very self obssessed.

Would make a good sales person because she'll be as two-faced as needs be to get what she wants, but I'd never trust her with my own wallet.

Don't like Jenny. Her eyes are too far apart, i mean there's room for another eye in there. It would freak me out a bit if i was face to face with her.

I was only referring to the point of her being labelled a "bitch" rather than her business performance.

Can I just ask what other responsibilities you felt Lucinda "abdicated" from?

And totally devoid of business acumen, as she proved.

Her intelligence is in doubt and she certainly is not priority conscious.
Giving exclusivity to such a tiny organisation is absolute taboo. Something learned with the basics of selling.

Self-aware, focussed and driven yes, to her own ends.

I don't much lik Lindi either, but she did only agree to a three month period.
Jennifer was unconditional, if the guy had asked for a half share of the farm she'd have given it, she was that desperate.