The Apprentice 2: Why Sandy Lost

I went on a bit of a rant in “Why Kevin Lost” about how Trump knew what the contestants’ résumés looked like before the game ever started, so the topic really should not even come up at this point unless it was directly related to a problem he had seen in their actions. We didn’t see anything from Sandy that indicated her entrepreneurial nature, as opposed to working up the corporate ladder, had caused any problems. However, if Trump had it in mind already that he wanted somebody with a specific type of experience, then somebody like Sandy would have had to excel to overcome that prejudice.

Moving on to the fifth rule, we did not really see anything that was particularly disloyal in Sandy’s behavior. I think we can rule this one out and move on.

The sixth is to not show your hand. Once again, this was the interview phase, so there really wasn’t much strategy. Still, Jen caught Sandy and Kelly talking about her, so Jen likely knew she was a target and therefore could have been ready to fight.

Since Sandy was busted gossiping about Jen, does that mean she failed to play well with others? Actually, not really. She seemed to get along fairly well, no matter what she might have thought of her competitors. All we need to do is look at the M&M task to see that. Sandy and Jen had been screaming at each other just the previous night. Then they had to work together and did fine.

The eighth rule says to focus on the long-term. Honestly, I’m not sure that Sandy either particularly excelled at this, nor did she do anything particularly wrong. However, if Trump was thinking long-term, he might have determined that somebody with only Sandy’s type of experience would not do as well as a Jen or a Kelly. In that case, though, we go back to what I was saying about him knowing her résumé before the show ever started. We’ll call this one a draw.

One thing we didn’t really see Sandy do was thinking outside the box. Sure, she had some good ideas. Sure, she was a hard worker. But did she come up with anything that made us say, “Wow!”? I can’t think of anything. She really needed something like that to overcome Trump’s preconceived notions about somebody without a full college-plus-business-school education and corporate experience.

The tenth rule is to use common sense. I think Sandy failed in this a bit during her argument with Jen. She was trying to make a point that she had taken risks. But in doing so, Trump got the idea that Sandy did not value education. I think this was a misunderstanding on his part, but common sense would pretty well tell a person not to attack somebody else for having degrees that they themselves don’t have. In Sandy’s case, it wasn’t so much a failure of common sense, but a failure to properly lay out her points in favor of an overly-emotional argument.

When it comes down to it, we don’t have a whole lot of good explanation for Sandy’s firing. However, when we look through the discussion above, and we listen to what Trump said when he sent her packing, we find that there is a match. Sandy did not stay cool under fire. She let her emotions dictate how she argued, and she was unable to lay out her points in a well-organized fashion that would avoid misunderstanding and convince other people that she was right. This tactic worked against Andy, who was sticking too closely to proper debating techniques. But it didn’t work against Jen, who is a lawyer and perhaps more used to picking holes and taking apart other people’s arguments. Sandy’s emotional arguing played right into Jen’s hands. That is why Sandy lost.

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David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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