On last night's The Apprentice..

[green_amber]

Well it seems pretty obvious to me by now that Sayid the Arrogant Wanker (as he shall hereafter be known) will win. Sugar seems to translate "business" into nothing but "can sell" - which will give us a Sayid: Ruth* final (with an outside bet on the black guy, Ansell is it? sorry, all the names are really unmemorable somehow.) but I reckon he'll leave a woman to the end to head off criticism and she *can* sell. I heard Sugar rhapsodising about Sayid's selling abilities on Radio 4 as well..

The contestants may indeed be wankers, but what is really coming off badly is the face of modern British business - is business really about nothing except being a grown up barrow boy in a suit? No room for strategy, marketing, management, risk analysis, long term client relationships, creative ideas, anything but sell sell sell?? When did "planner" become a rude word?? If I was considering a career in business, I can't imagine anything that would put me off more.

* just to prove I'm not racisst I got her name wrong too- it's Ruth not Karen..

Comments

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

You had me confused because I thought Karen=Michelle the blond lancastrian bitch.

We'll know if Syed get's fired because the teaser for the ep will be Alan pointing and saying "You're a wanker, you're fired."

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

*howls with laughter*

Sorry bout the name confusion.

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

whenever I see this (which is always the next day because the Tivo does Grand Designs, and so I always know who's won before I see it), I despair at the state of the "cream of young British business people".

and then I remember that the candidates were picked by a television production company, to give us something enjoyable to watch. And that the programmes are days and days of footage, edited down to an hour, to give us something enjoyable to watch.

having said that, this year's lot seem not a patch on last year's; and I pity Sugar having to work with any of them.

my money's on Ruth, but only because she's a badger.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

The liar vs the badger!

[andrewducker]

It does sound like the people they've chosen are the _problem_ with business, and not how well-run businesses actually work.

But then who buys anything from Amstrad nowadays?

[spride.livejournal.com]

Sky. They make The Dirty Digger's STBs.

[(Anonymous)]

Me. I have an Amstrad 36" widescreen TV which cost me £300-odd quid in 1999. It's cheap and plasticky, has no bells or whistles but, you know, it works. I loved my PCW8512 as well.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that 1999 counts as nowadays :->

[spride.livejournal.com]

It's farcical, isn't it? There's nothing there that exercises any other business skill, or even *aptitude* (and isn't that what one would look for in an apprentice, rather than fully formed specialisms?), than sales negotiations (in whichever direction). It seems to be an exercise in showcasing Sugar's class prejudice and colossal chip-on-shoulder attitude rather than any commercial principle.

And you're just sulking 'cos Karen the Lawyer got it in the neck early :-)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

True:-) But she did seem to have the odd particle of brain and not be a complete git..

[spride.livejournal.com]

...which speaks volumes...

Speaking as someone in business ...

[palatinate.livejournal.com]

I watched a tiny amount of series 1 and I'm not watching series 2 at all, and one reason is, as already noted, that it's only oriented to sales negotiation and not rounded business skills. And the fact is that you do need to have an awareness of selling principles, commercials etc to do many business roles, but you don't have to be a *Salesman*. That's a very specific animal and we employ particular people to do that job.

I think the emphasis on this area says more about Alan Sugar and the nature of his business (retail electronics with a focus at the lower end of the market where price and marketing are all you've got) than about any wider aspect of UK business.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

is business really about nothing except being a grown up barrow boy in a suit?

I say yes!

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

Ruth is the only one I'd want working with me. She's rough, tough and unpolished, but she knows how to sell and she understands her limitations. She's not (like most of them) a raging egomaniac, and my beloved, who runs a commercial vehicle business and knows the motor trade inside out, pointed out that she was the only truly competent one in the car-lot episode. But yes, she's competent at the barrowboy level, I wouldn't necesarily trust her to plan a substantial project or manage a large team, but I think she'd appreciate how hard it was. Sayid &co would rush in with a load of half-digested MBA In Five Minutes bullshit and make a cods of it.

Alan Sugar's kind of business is largely pile it high and sell it as dear as you can - which is why he's an ideal mentor for this kind of show. (One of my team has worked on software projects for Sugar back when he sold home computers. His only comment was that he wanted to wash his hands after shaking hands with him...) but the trouble is, to show "real" big business would take big, complex projects with realistic budgets and timescales. Planning and tracking an 18 month multi-million-Euro project isn't the kind of thing you can make a TV gameshow about. The Apprentice will always emphasise short-termism because it's sound-bitey!

(Oh: Sayid is one of the most phenomenally obnoxious people I've ever seen on television. He's such compulsive telly (in the same way that the hapless, hopeless Jo was... actually, I know why AMS finally sacked her, it was the sight of those awful bare corned-beef legs in his office for the fourth week running, buy a decent pair of tights, woman!)

British business is horribly short-termy these days. Goes back to the 80s, really. (One of the great corporate raiders of those days, think it might've been Lord Hanson, insisted on a 20% return on capital from any company he bought. It was easy to do that for the first couple of years - the MDs of the companies they bought flogged off the executive Jags, sold the corporate headquarters etc... but come year 3 or so the cupboard was bare and the companies were only fit to be liquidated).

Actually, so's European business generally. We've been trying to get a measly 1m euros or so to fund some very strategic R&D work from our parent company, but they won't cough up because it doesn't put anything on the 2006 or 2007 balance sheet. Which is a bit bloody daft given that our parent company employs quarter of a million people and probably wastes more than that standardising email fonts... ;P

Anyway, I'm off out of it to join a company that's actually setting up a blue-sky R&D division ;)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Yeh this jibes completely with our experience of trying to get corporate sponsorship for blue skies funding in e-commerce research, intellectual property law etc etc -- we wwre told by the head of Giant Company (United Biscuits I think it was) that they never invested in anything that wouldn't create profit in the next quarterly figures.. duhhh...

[tokyo-mb.livejournal.com]

While the focus on quarterly earnings still exists, I think the pendulum is slowly swinging back to a slightly longer term view. Numerous companies have over the last year or two come out against providing quarterly earnings guidance and this, I think, offers the best hope that decision making moves towards the longer-term.

That said, if your income depends to a significant extent on what your options are doing, and the analysts are driving your share price based on quarterly results, change is unlikely to happen overnight...