The task? To run a food marquee during the “Festival of a small stretch of the Thames”, or something. Whichever team made the most would win. Bleedin’ simple, you would think, given that as with all tasks there seem to be no associated costs whatsoever. This is the Apprentice, a world in which hired help magically appear - just snap your clamshell mobile shut three teams, while saying “there’s no time and materials cost like at home” - when and wherever needed. Only trouble with all the unhired help is of course that they’re all competent, and are therefore all eminently more employable than any of the candidates themselves.
Because if these are among the best business minds we have, then we’re all headed to recession central in a chicken-shaped taxi. OK, so maybe my brain is addled by the absence of its usual chemical intake right now, but I could spoon out my basal ganglia, serve it up with noodles, and I reckon I’d still be able to spot that making a loss of nearly £900 in one day, while trying to sell food to the people of London (who have already been shown to be willing to pay £5 for an apple in this series) is not the stuff of business legend.
I mean, Christ in a wetsuit, who turns up at a wholesalers without checking whether they’re open or not? Who just orders some, or even 100, chickens over the phone without providing any details whatsoever? How in the name of croque do you end up with three times as much cheese as you thought? And will someone please tell me how you can end up with 100 pizza bases, and 100 whole chickens to put on them? And then, when you have all these chickens, why for the love of amuse-bouche did an entire team not come up with any way of off-loading all the excess ingredients? Have they never had a christmas dinner?
Irritatingly, all this duffness meant that the task was an easy win for Mani’s team. Which means plaudits for the show’s Mr Slick. Which in turn means a thousand paper cuts to the body of the patron saint of Genuine. In praise of Mani, though, he did manage the girls better than most before him, although I don’t think his habit of somehow busying himself with other tasks while the girls spent 12 hours chopping and shredding ingredients went down all that well.
Still, they all seemed to get on, no-one cried, and they made a profit on the day. And so to the Oxo Tower restaurant for slap-up nosh.
And so to the boardroom for Alexa, Syed, and Tuan, whose collective performance was the eating equivalent of a few sticks of celery, if that whole takes more calories to digest than it contains thing is to be believed. Sadly, Sugarman opts not to fire them all, comes close to letting Syed go, before pointing the Pearly finger of bloody blame in Alexa’s direction. Not that I like to see PMs get all the blame when things go horrifically wrong, but on this occasion, for not being in charge of anything, at any point, for being catatonically unable to take the lead when needed, she had to go.
Postscript:
For those interested, Alexa’s web site reveals the following:
Alexa is giving after dinner talks about this and the dos and donts for a high performing team and business lessons learnt from her apprentice experience.
Hmm.
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