I totally agree with this... Alex is a snake - like when Lee and Lucinda were talking, Alex said 'Is it alright if I get back to selling?' If I was Lucinda, I would have slapped him =]

Lee's weakness is Alex, when Lucinda is around - but i can't put all the blame on Alex, for Lee should have been a good Project Manager to go through - at least what the cars were - with Lucinda. But, he dind't even take her weaknesses into record - he basically betrayed her, by staying with Alex to sell the Zonda's after he had even asked her what she would want him to do...
When Lucinda is Project Manager, she is there to provide support, give amazing ideas and over-see things to a brilliant standard; everything that Sir Alan surely wants in his Apprentice...(?)

Arghh!! I said I was going to shut up...but ...but.... just on this point okay....

I don't attribute his deteriorating respect for Lucinda entirely down to Alex's influence, ....If you look back at my posts I haven't showered Lucinda with blanket praise..... but I would argue that Alex's influence does appear to have changed the way in which Lee has dealt with Lucinda.....imo he was much less effective in this respect than he has been before. (I contrasted it with his previous approach during the Morroco task in an earlier post.)

My opinion is based purely on what actually happened on screen and what can legitimately be drawn from what happens on it.

We can go round in circles blaming either Lucinda or Lee ....however it always takes at least two to tango......and the three of them contributed to the problems in various ways (see my other posts).

My point was that given all possible variables, all the information and experience gained throughout the previous tasks..... Lee made some good and bad decisions this week -
Good = car choice,
Bad= job allocation & people management

IMO as PM Lee didn't handle the team mangement issues particularily well this around...he's done better....his reaction/actions towards the "Lucinda issue" inflamed rather than dissappated the situation. (Despite the win it did effect the potential bottom line.)

Like I say I doubt we'll ever agree on this


I agree with you...but I always end up hoping that the PM will remember it's their role to remain a bit more detached...... in order to recognize the valid points that might be hidden within the whinging....or the BS in the good idea.....this overview helps the PM to be goal focussed while still managing efficiently.

I guess how you deal with the stress is part of the challenge.

Some candidates deal well with stress as PM but badly with it as team members, some behave exactly in reverse. Ideally you would handle both scenarios with ease.....I know I don't....I'm sure I wouldn't handle either well on tv LOL sigh!

Ve haf vays of making you argue!


This is what interested me because I've seen it said a lot and you offer cogent reasons beyond the "I hate Alex" type. Forgive me if I've missed this in one of your earlier posts, but can you tell me where the idea that Alex is influencing Lee with regard to Lucinda actually comes from? You mentioned Marrakesh, where Lee saw Lucinda as problematic. At that point, Lee had been in the same team with her for four weeks, so although he praised her as PM, it suggests some hesitation about her. The following week, she was PM which is when she seems to be most appreciated by her team mates. Then Alex joins and it's the tissue task. Is that where the breakdown is marked from? Is there an idea that if it had been Lee, Lucinda and Claire or Lee, Lucinda and Helene, then Lee would have been more pleased with Lucinda's contribution to the tissue task and this one?

What strikes me about the deterioration is that the fewer there are on the team, the more likely any weaknesses are exposed. The stress levels are also higher. This is true for all of them but that Lucinda seems to be particularly disadvantaged.

That is very, very true. If you rewatch some of the earlier episodes, the number of contestants who passed under the radar by not actually contributing anything at all, good or bad, and were not brought back to the boardroom by the losing project manager is amazing.

Ian, Kevin, Lee and Michael all contributed absolutely nothing to the first task - yet Alex didn't think about bringing any of those back with him. Lee, Raef, Alex and Michael contributed nothing to the pub grub task, but Ian didn't think about bringing any of those back.

In the earlier tasks, the people who worked hard but ultimately the hard work came to nothing seemed to be brought back in favour of the ones who didn't even try.

Now (since it dropped to four members per team), because there have been so few in each team, every single team member is scrutinised carefully, and a contestant's lack of input is highlighted as much as a contestant's flawed input. Though for some reason Helene seems to keep getting away with it.

Damn blast I'm so easy!



There is no doubt that there would still have been issues...there's always issues lol......but the problems would have been different..... and might not have contributed to what looked like an almost complete breakdown in Lee and Lucinda's working relationship, in general terms. (That's not to say they wouldn't have had frictions)

One of Lucinda's weaknesses is as a team member is she gets demotivated and flappy when she feels she's being ignored or isn't given strong direction ....this is how she reacts to stress.... Lee had already worked out the best way to handle this as PM...ie work with her closely. And he had initially intended to repeat this strategy.

One of Lee's strengths is his enthusiasm and energy ....but this can sometimes be overpowering - when he gets stressed he can be aggressive and too in your face... but Lucinda as PM understood this and managed to focus his energy.... getting the best out of him selling fongs...a task he wasn't looking forward to but that he ended up enjoying.

I genuinely believe both Lee and Lucinda ...for better or worse do try to contribute to the success of the task given ....even if under stress they sometimes make bad choices or act stupidly.

However....

My opinion is that Alex operates very differently. Alex works politically and will watch mistakes take place within a task without intervening, if it can be usefull to him in the bigger game of "making it through till next week".

Part of this strategy is to dodge direct responsibility when you are team member (as he did in the task with Simon) and to off load large chunks of reponsibility if you are unlucky enough to become PM (as he did in week one).

As the numbers twindle these strategies can't work as well....it becomes more important to align yourself with the one obviously strong member of the team and to undermine the other....creating an us and them division.... which offers some protection in the boardroom. I think SAS already mentioned that Alex seems to sweet talk his PM's


(I bet if Alex had been working as team with Claire and Helene ... he would be trying to sweet talk Claire and rolling his eyes and arguing with Helene......supposition but it is based on watching how Alex has operated within the tasks throughout the series. )

The "bad"/corosive element which Alex brought to the team was "office politics"...while everyone gets invovled in that process inside the boardroom..... some (the 2 L's) subvert that aspect to a large extent when getting down to the task ... other's do not (Alex.)

^ Excellent analysis.

He did, but the problem I had with him doing that, was that for that particular task he had made about 3/4 of the entire teams sale, and the praise he was getting from the PM was actually justified for once.

kazmson, thank you for setting that out so clearly.

It seems to me that the conclusion - that Alex influenced Lee against Lucinda - is based more on an analysis of Alex's character as portrayed in the show than on anything Alex actually did or said in last Tuesday's program or the week before.

That's not to necessarily disagree with your view on his character. Your fluent analysis is one I can certainly understand. I'm not that hard on Alex. As Frost states in the post above, SAS's suggestion that he sweet-talked his PMs, with its implication that his standing with his PM was undeserved as evidenced by the rarity of his presence in the boardroom despite losing six times, was unmerited in that particular case. I'm also conscious that I haven't ever seen him sweet-talk his PMs. I felt that the assumption that this was at the heart of Alex's survival gave too little credit to his PMs and colleagues, implying that they were weak and pliable, as if their impression of Alex, with whom they worked, was one not formed intelligently. Having said that, I do agree largely with what you say about him. He is political. This is not uncommon in the business world in my experience. (And being stubbornly non-political, it's something I hate in people when I see it, but I'm realistic enough to know that it can serve the wielder very well.)

What I'm not convinced by is the extent to which Alex's modus operendi is responsible for Lee's attitude to Lucinda. Perhaps what I'm saying is that Alex doesn't really have to do anything at all to bring about a souring of the Lee-Lucinda relationship. I think that had Alex been replaced with any other of the existing candidates, things would have happened in much the same way.

I think the main problem is that on the BBC website it states that About 160 hours is filmed for each hour-long programme, it is claimed. The resulting show is therefore very much the “edited highlights” of the two teams’ activities over the three days. so we never see the entire project and how much each individual puts into the task.

That is why I think sometimes we have wondered why someone was brought into the BR instead of another candidate. It is because we see such a minute part of the prject we are not the best placed to say either way.

Lee has worked on quiet a few tasks now with Lucinda so I do not think Alex could sway his oppinion of her. As Lee said Lucinda pecks away and in the end manages to really get to her colleagues in a negative way. Although I can see why some say he should have gone with Lucinda, his task as PM was to win the task and he could only do that by having his 2 best sales people selling the Zonda

Exactly, Katenutzs. This is one of the reasons why I give enormous weight to the views of the candidates themselves. They are the ones who are there 24/7, who see exactly what a person and doesn't do. Of course, it's a competition and of course people are going to concentrate on the weaknesses of others in the boardroom to protect themselves, but on the whole, I trust their collective judgement.

Hence my unpopular opinion that Sara was a complete waste of space and that Lucinda is too on the occasions when she is not in charge.

From the programme on the remaining apprentices last night, it was said that Lucinda was the highest earner amongst them. Does this alter anyone's opinion of her?

In my case, no. She works in the finance industry which attracts the highest salaries in the UK so even if existing salary were a legitimate basis for determining the worth of the apprentices, any comparison would be skewed.

No.

She is a bright, intelligent woman with a great deal of common sense and an excellent manager but with a tendency to flap if things are not going well and she cannot do anything to put them right.

I would expect her to be earning well provided she find herself a suitable niche.

She's streets ahead in the popularity stakes on this site and I doubt that revelations of a high salary are going to be a surprise to many.

One of the reasons why the financial sector pay so well is because they demand a great deal from their employees. And because they pay so well they get the pick of some of the best people. Evidently Lucinda is a well thought of employee working in a very tough and competetive environment.

I have a suspicion that that fact really sticks in the craw of some.

Not mine. Anybody else?

Collective judgement is the last thing I'd trust. Social psychology has a lot to tell us about the impact of conformity on our reasoning ability (we've already seen the mob mentality at play in this series). The views of the individual soon become the views of the collective which can then totally warp the perceptions of an ordinarily rational, high functioning individual. Surely we've all experienced or even been guilty of this? At its mildest, its a bitch-fest that leads to one person being ostracised. At its worst, it's the Holocaust.

That's before we even get to the fact that, as you point out, they're in a competition and will be very strategic about who they point the finger at. I'd therefore expect the 'typical' Apprentice candidate to be disinclined towards anyone 'different' and outside their frame of reference, anyone who they perceive as 'weak', or anyone they perceive as a 'threat'.

I'd also challenge you to consider that with over one hundred hours of footage on the cutting room floor per episode, those ruthless buggers have probably given each of their competitors a thoroughly good verbal drubbing. I know you've said elsewhere that you go entirely what you see, and as a policy that seems like a fair one, but you must also acknowledge the possibility that we're routinely dripfed a particular one-dimensional narrative for each person.

I have to say im also suprised Lucinda has lasted so long

There were some interesting things that came out about Lucinda in the programme on Monday about the background to the five finalists - she refused to talk about her childhood, she chose to cut herself off from her family and she is the highest earner. She is obviously slightly eccentric but she is also clearly a very capable woman who has come through a lot and made a success of her life. I think she is a very dark horse and I should imagine she is very hard to to read as she doesn't seem to fit clearly into any particular pigeonholes.

I agree Scarlet O'Hara but i also think there is no smoke without fire and that is what gives me the element of doubt that Lucinda is in fact manulipating things a wee bit.

Well guys, at about one o'clock this afternoon, if our nasty little friend Vivid only received a one week ban, he will be allowed to rejoin the party. Should we all welcome him with open arms - or should we all put him on our ignore list so we can't actually see any of the poisonous bile he writes in response to people who want to have a reasonable discussion with him?

Of course, if the ban was for longer than a week - there's a chance we won't ever see him again. Or at least won't see him until the day of the final.

I don't think any of them are 'very' good.

Tricky one.

How much can someone grow up in a week?

One thing is for sure is that unlike a certain reailty show coming to hit our screens with wall to wall crap, is that we need more coverage of a reailty show that is really worth watching.

And he's back. No longer a Banned Member, his name-tag now says Forum Member. How long will he last - who knows? Expect more Alex praising and Lucinda and Claire bashing very very soon...

With any luck he'll have lost interest.

Scarlet O'Hara, I think there is a difference between collective judgement and mob mentality, or rather that there can be a difference although often the two overlap. It would be unwise to fail to consider mob mentality at work as you've described, but it would be an equal mistake to dismiss an opinion that is shared by many of them as merely the strong ganging up on the weak.

In my mind, it's more a "weight of evidence" issue. The candidates have lived and worked together for some time. Their identification of "weak" has its genesis in this experience, experience that none of the commentators of the edited highlights can have. Their definition of weak is those who pull down the team and cause it to lose tasks. There had already been examples of where both Sara and Lucinda had been shown to be at odds with their teammates as to the value of their contributions. Their judgement has weight, even if it's wholly appropriate to consider questions of competitiveness and group think.

I don't see this group of apprentices being disinclined to anyone they perceive as a threat as there as been no apparent targeting of Claire who has become increasingly and overtly teacher's pet. Had I seen this, I would certainly have to reassess the degree of reliance I place on their views about Sara and Lucinda, notwithstanding what I saw independently as legitimate reasons for them to hold that view.

I know that there are dynamics in human behaviour that can be tracked and studied but I'm not a social psychologist and I do recognise how little we do actually see of what happens. I don't rely wholly on what I see as I'm not a passive viewer, although I won't let pass an interpretation that is contradicted on screen (hence transcribing a few scenes). Like everyone else (I hope), I have to bring my own experiences and reason to bear on what I see when forming any sort of judgement about the candidates all the while acknowledging that I'm being manipulated by the editors choices.