Except that as she never even seemed to get to first base she wouldn't have looked at the paperwork.

I suppose she should really have been a bit more positive in her dealing with Lee and demanded that he told her a bit about the car and what was likely to be relevant to the punters. He would probably have responded better to that.


Yes, I suppose ideally she should not have dwelt on the perceived hopelessness of the task but maximised her efforts to get herself to a state where she could at least make a credible effort.

I'm very sympathetic in this instance because cold selling is something that I just cannot do. At all.


I think he should have allowed her to watch himself and Alex for a hour or so and filled her in on some of the details whilst they were not selling.

If they'd been swamped she could have handled the paperwork allowing them to get on with the selling and if they were not doing business they would have had time to bring her up to speed.

(Of course, I've had a few hours to work that out and he had to make a much quicker decision.)

I wonder why Team Alpha didn't take both the Zonda and the Aston to the same location and feature them together.??

That way, anyone who didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) lash out on the really expensive car, might have instead plumped for the other one and they may have ended up with more sales albeit at a lower price each.

It also would have seen them working as a team with 2 strong sales people to sell 2 cars and Lucinda could have learned about sales on the task and been supported all the way.

Yes I didn't understand the strategy of either team in that regard. I think they would have been better to find one prominent location and stick to it. It was clear that the bulk of the sales were likely to come at the event in the evening anyway...

Lucinda has demonstrated great people/management skills, when she's project managed people have been clear about what needs to be done and she manages in a clear, calm manner and is willing to listen to others - I'd be happy to work with her.

She' obviously not a sales person, but she does have many atributes which should be overlooked because she lacks in this area. I sell for a living, and not everyone can do it, but not everyone can manage successfully either.

I really like Lucinda generally, she has great people, motivation, management and organisational skills. Selling she is poor at but Im sure SAS has plenty of sales staff she is also no technophobe but Im sure SAS has plenty of technical staff. She is very articulate and a good communicator . She needs to toughen up a little and play to her stregnths. I think in the interview process next week she may do well as she is not a liar or bullshitter and they always get found out.

Both teams had to split into two sub-teams - in effect, meaning that they had to be a one and a two. Maybe the rules said that the two teams had to be a certain distance apart, so they couldn't act as a single team selling both cars.

It was just strange that Lucinda (who knew nothing about cars) and Michael (who knew nothing about cars) were the two who went off on their own. Particularly as the Aston Martin and the Ferrari should have been the easiest to sell - they were the most affordable, they could be bought by the hour, and every boy-racer wants to drive an Aston and a Ferrari. Yes, the tiny number of sales of the Zonda won the task for Lee, but if either he or Alex had tried to sell the Aston, they would have got dozens and dozens of sales. Same if Claire had been selling the Ferrari. The two most popular cars were being sold by the two most inept sales people.

I see - I hadn't caught on about the rule which stipulated that they had to be in two sub-teams for selling. In the weddings task they were permitted to sell their 2 different products at the same point AND seemed to be permitted to swap roles within the team.

It seems strange that they wouldn't have allowed them to do this with the cars.

At least in Michael's case he made the decision to do that himself as PM, as opposed to Lucinda who was basically abandoned to sink or swim on her own by The Brothers Smug....

Very true.

Yes, as project manager she does listen to people but that is about the only thing she does do. A weak, inept and ineffectual manager does just the same thing. Her supporters seem to be interpreting her lack of direction and organisation and strategy and other abilities as compensated for by her kindly accommodating project management style. Her project management style is effectively to let her team members do their own thing, so it lacks the offensive authoritarianism of some PM styles we have seen, such as Jenny's, but simply being nice is not being a good team leader!

She cannot handle challenges of any sort and her skills are next to non-existent. She might be ok as a friend, but as a boss she is a disaster. I think some people think that the job they are applying for is for some sort of social worker position where being nice to people will be the main role, the position is nothing like that.

I'm sure that inappropriate instances of being nice to people are not a problem with which you are familiar on a personal basis.

Probably Sir A has learned to control the degree to which he lets the testosterone hold sway in his dealings.

Something that Alex and Lee have singularly failed to do.

Lee was exeptionally fortunate that they won, and his people management on this task wasn't subjected to closer scrutiny.

In my opinion he demonstrated some of the weakest management skills of the entire series. The whole raffle ticket conversation was a complete fiasco and I would have relished the opportunity to see him explain himself.

True he had passion and can sell but what else can he do?
The real problem with the programme is that most tasks boil down to selling be it tissues, food or hi spec cars. In the real business world organisations also require people who can plan, devise concepts and consider more complex esoteric issues than these task ever demand.

As a result certain candidates don't shine and their particular strengths go unnoticed and unrewarded.

Sorry, but I can't agree, she listens and organises, and can deal with issues arising - for example rebuking Lee during the wedding task, point was made fairly, dealt with swiftly and they both moved on.


She organised her teams well, allocated tasks to those most suitable - I can't see any evidence of her 'letting her team members do their own thing'.


She can't handle sales particularly well, certainly, but she's demonstated extremely good organisational and management skills. They may not be right for the position in SAS's organisation, but she's certainly got them.

Lucinda is apalling as a businesswoman, although she may or may not be a nice person but the purpose of the show is to test the applicant's business acumen.
1. She was scared stiff of the task and was begging for hand holding.
2. She got the name of the car wrong at the first sales point
and still couldn't pronounce it at the second sales point.
3. Every time she faces criticism she starts blubbering.
etc etc.
4. Dress sense is inappropriate for a business environment except for arty crafty stuff.

The only reason she is still there is due to her being on the winning team last night ( no thanks to her) and there being a paucity of good candidates this year

You really need to look at your your objective analysis skills and remove the perceived bias, vitriol and emotive terminology within your posts as they are coming over as negative rants. I say this because there are valid points in your post which are in danger of being ignored.

But to respond yes I agree failure to perform basic preparation was a failure point of her own making. Also demanding attention showed lack of initiative and immaturity.

This backs up my opinion that when placed outside her comfort zone she panics.

When looking at the task as a competition then Lee was entitled to treat her as he did. His priorities are to himself
and how to prevent himself getting fired. In doing this he decided that it wasn't his job to handhold a struggling team member.

So your points are valid when looking at the task as a competition. Which at the end of the day is was.


However what I feel is unfair is the overall personal assassination of how she performs in tasks i.e that challenging ideas is destructive moaning. In this your conclusion fails to take into account what her role as Risk and QA provides to projects.

I write this because from my observations (Which are based on many years working on many projects
and many boardrooms). She appears to be able to apply typical QA type skills of honesty, desire for control, challenge of concepts and pre-conceptions etc. quite well. She also shows typically QA traits in lack of pragmatism and tendency to obstruct.

In short What her main failing is basically naivety in not realising she was in a competition with back stabbers and cutthroats and that she needed to adapt herself to each task. Instead she is treating it as a project where people will be expected to be honest and professional and so is unprepared when team members fail to meet that expectation.

So unless you work or know her personally I feel your vitriol against her is both unfair and misguided.

As to the apprentice itself I also feel that she has done well to get this far but doubt she will get through to the final.

lucinda admitted she needed help and got blanked by lee-michael who pretends he knows about selling on the other hand done crap

at least lucinda admits her faults-it was lee who pushed her out andmade her lookbad

i also thought siralan was too hard on her

Lets face it though "Project management" is stretching it a bit anyway.

I am a consultant project manager, with an MSc in Project management. I manage an urban expansion project worth over £100 million over 10 years. I oversee consultants, contractors, local authority, designers, residents, utility companies, solicitors, planners and so on. The budgeting and programming is so complex, not to mention the level of organistaion and communication and the problems that inevitably occur.

These muppets are renting out cars and going shopping in markets. Hardly 'projects' in the modern professional terminology. They all want to call themselves "project managers" but they really haven't a clue. They can't even keep on top of these simplistic tasks.

I agree, he should have done more with the Lucinda problem and in the end he did nothing but become a salesman. He only had a few project management decisions to make: car selection; location; and team breakdown. I think the location in paternoster square for advertising the zonda was absolutely brilliant but I am unsure as to how that location was selected. In the end this task was more about individual performance rather than the performance of project managers.

To be fair, Lee and Lucinda were both in mutually incompatible binds by that point. Lee desperately needed to close a sale and needed to concentrate all his resources on that. Lucinda desperately needed half an hour of confidence-building close management. The outcome wasn't ideal but I don't think either of them disgraced themself.

It was interesting to see Lucinda getting more motivated as the day wore on, rather than demoralised as happened last week. I think Lee deserves some credit for that - she would have kept floundering with Alex as PM.

I think your post puts this all into perspective. Commodities manager, Sales manager, HR manager are very different kettles of fish to an actual project manager. Each requiring different skill sets.

Out of interest, if you had to delegate a task to one of the
apprentices, which one would you pick?

They are team leaders or house captains at best.

I suspect that there must have been a certain ammount of pre arrangement with Paternoster Sq and Claire and Helene's pitch. Pretty sure you can't just drive up on the day and start selling. I wonder if these 2 locations were down to the production teams rather than the PMs?

She listens because she needs the input of others. Her rebuke of Lee was totally unjustified and seemed to be more about her wishing to advertise her status as team leader rather than because it was merited. She seemed intent on humiliating Lee and he very magnanimously decided not to make an issue of it, had she been in his place she would have kicked up one of her childish tantrums. This one incident demonstrated her ineptness, she chose to publicly humiliate Lee in front of a client which was very silly.

If you recall she failed to allocate the team members sensibly in the ice cream task and as a result her half of the team were running around on silly leads. Another bad decision. In the tasks she was PM most of the team basically did their own thing, one could argue that the type of tasks made this natural, and so they disguised her lack of project management.

At no stage did she demonstrate good team organisation skills, on the few issues of team organisation that came up in her tasks she did poorly.

I recall when Sir Alan asked if Lucinda had been a good team leader her team all said yes, she was very good and Lee in particular praised her abilities as a manager.