The Apprentice 3, Analysis of a Win: Bedazzled by a Beefy T

Over the past few weeks, we have seen teammates Kendra and Craig get increasingly hostile in their dealings with each other. But somehow, their team has managed to pull out win after win despite the conflicts. Their ability to function as a team was really put to the test this week, when Tana (who’d occasionally acted as peacemaker between the two) was asked to leave the team and join Net Worth, and Kendra and Craig were forced to work together without a “buffer zone” of any other teammates.

After getting their newest assignment—to design a limited-edition Hanes T-shirt—Kendra stepped up to be this week’s project manager. She did so mostly to sustain some sort of ownership over the project. “I need to maintain some sense of control,” she explained in an interview. “If Craig were project manager, I would be completely shut down.” She was probably basing this assumption on the way Craig treated her during the Staples task, and I don’t really blame her. Craig’s out-of-line “young lady” remark and his backwards ideas about brainstorming still make me want to gag.

After meeting with the artist who would be designing their shirts, Kendra and Craig made what was probably the best decision of the whole task: They emailed roughly 3,000 of the artist’s fans and informed them that they were selling a limited-edition T-shirt that would feature a design by the artist. Since they were selling the shirts in the art district, they figured they could sell a lot of shirts to this particular client base. It’s a good thing they were able to work together on the marketing, because they wouldn’t agree on another thing for the rest of the task.

Craig and Kendra’s first conflict arose while trying to decide which design to put on the shirts. Kendra mentioned that she liked hearts; Craig wanted stars because they were “more universal.” Since they couldn’t agree, Kendra made an executive decision to go with the hearts. Craig was ticked off by this decision, and complained in an interview that the only reason Kendra ever listened to his opinion was so that she could go ahead and make the decision that was the “exact opposite of it.” After that first incident of butting heads, Craig decided to just let Kendra make all of her own decisions—hoping that, if the team ended up in the Boardroom, Kendra would be fired for her bad decision-making.

So Craig let Kendra make all the decisions, and didn’t mention that it was a problem until later in the day, when they were discussing prices for the shirts. (Kendra was more worried about pricing the shirts too high than Craig was.) Kendra made a point of saying, “I value your perspective, and I’d like to meet you in the middle,” and that’s when Craig began complaining to her about not involving him on decisions. The big problem here is that, at this point, most of the decisions had already been made. If Craig didn’t feel involved in the process, he should have voiced his concerns to Kendra before every decision had been made (which he didn’t do before because, as I pointed out earlier, he wanted Kendra to make her own bad decisions, and end up crashing and burning if they lost). Bringing these concerns up after the fact, when nothing could be done about it, is very petty and childish. Especially when a very surprised Kendra asked, “Why didn’t you communicate this to me before?” and Craig responded: “It’s irrelevant.” It seemed like a very passive-aggressive thing to do, and it only brought more tension to an already dysfunctional team dynamic. Even Carolyn seemed concerned at this point: “Kendra and Craig definitely clash. Right now I think that dynamic could hurt them in the end.”

All things considered, Kendra and Craig did a pretty fair job of working together to sell those T-shirts. The artist’s fan base came out like they had hoped, and they also worked to educate casual shoppers about the artist and the limited-edition T-shirts. The only snag that we saw came when Craig began giving out discounts to people who were buying multiple shirts. To his credit, when Kendra asked him to stop (since they weren’t making extra sales from the discounts—he was taking off money after he had already made the sale, which makes no sense), he only argued for a second and then stopped.

In the end, Magna made about twice as much money from their T-shirts as Net Worth did—even though they’d priced their shirts lower. It turned out that tapping into the artist’s fan base—something Net Worth overlooked completely—made a “yooge” difference in their sales. It wasn’t clear whose idea that was, but that was probably the biggest reason why they won.

This week was the final week for team tasks. Next week, there are no teams. Kendra, Tana, and Craig—who were all members of Team Magna just last week—will be fighting to survive tough interviews and competing against each other to land the coveted top two spots, and then one will go on to become The Apprentice. I’ve been watching these three perform—and win—for several weeks now, and based on what I’ve seen, my money’s on Kendra to be the big winner. She has performed consistently despite her clashes with Craig, displayed a stronger work ethic than the other two (on the Pontiac task, for instance), and has continued to come up with fantastic ideas that play a big part in winning the task. And I think that she is truly the driving force behind Magna’s nine-task winning streak.

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Angela Dalecki is a part-time freelance writer based in Wilmington, DE. Her work can also be seen at Nights & Weekends and Suite 101. She pays her bills by working at TV Guide. You can email Angela at altorose@gmail.com.

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