I am fairly sure that in reviewing each of the tasks, I am writing almost identical things to last year. The same mistakes are being made as were made last year and probably every other year before that.
Equally, the candidates are being set tasks that are almost impossible in the time available and require skills that are not necessarily related to business. For example, in week 4, they were required to deseed and chop 120kg of tomatoes in half a day. While it is not a desperately difficult task, if you have never done it before, it needs to be learnt before you can be efficient and half a day is not much time to learn.
In addition, they need to work as two separate teams who communicate infrequently. In week 6, one half of the team had to negotiate the costs for their corporate away day while the other half had to negotiate their revenue. It is very difficult for both parties to work in this disconnected way, particularly, as happened, when the revenue negotiators agreed a “luxury” package and the cost negotiators focussed on keeping costs low and so bought the cheapest options.
So, lets consider some of the mistakes that they made.
In week 4, they had to prepare potatoes and tomatoes for a corporate client and neither team seemed to ask all the right questions to determine the specifications required for the finished product. Similarly, in week 6 when designing a corporate away day, they failed to fully specify what was most important to the client. Not being precise with a specification makes success very difficult to achieve.
In week 4, one project manager completely ignored the opinions of the team, failed to account for their costs correctly and over rode the specifications for the delivery to a corporate client. Not surprisingly, they were fired faster than anyone else, ever.
In week 5, the teams were asked to create a new Easter Egg. Designing by committee is never a great approach and in trying to keep everyone happy, they end up with a mish mash of ideas that are not clear and they struggle to communicate to suppliers. In these instances, one person needs to take control and understand that less is usually more in these circumstances.
The candidates always give the impression that they are much bigger than they really are. In pitching their Easter Egg to supermarkets, they claimed “we have worked tirelessly to create this egg” when in reality they had spent a day creating it! It might just be me but these sorts of claims are obviously rubbish and should never be made.
Finally, one candidate quit the process before the end of the episode in episode 5. They said that while they had enjoyed the process, they realised that others wanted to win more than they did and that they deserved it more. This was a very generous decision and one that not many people would be willing to make. However, Alan Sugar and his team could not understand this and decided that they jumped before they were pushed. Their lack of empathy was something that really stood out to me and is possibly why I am not a multi-millionaire!