The Apprentice 5: Why Stacy Lost

Wondering why this article is a week or more late? Check out Why Bloomberg (Was) Lost for all the details.

Stacy felt like she was threatened by Brent. Or maybe she didn’t. Or maybe she did. But in any case, she obviously felt that Brent should have been the one to go home. Why did she join Pepi on the trip away from the suite instead? Why did Stacy lose?

Even almost two weeks after the fact, we still look back at the firing the same way, through the lens of What ‘Apprentice 5’ Applicants Should Have Learned.

The first rule says players need to show leadership. Stacy was not the project manager – Pepi volunteered for that role – but she could have followed this rule in other ways. Indeed, she did step up and provide the location for the team’s attempt to get people to text message. Unfortunately for her, she failed miserably at her selection. We’ll get to that more later.

I’m not sure if she was trying to put herself forward as a leader by the way she behaved during discussions among the group. Maybe that’s why she kept interrupting Brent. Or maybe she’s just a bitch. I dunno. But if it was the former and she was trying to put herself forward as a leader, she went about it in the wrong way.

She also went about the second rule wrong, as she completely failed to stay cool under pressure. Brent confronted her about the way she was behaving, and she went nuts over it. She tried to get Pepi to “fire” him from the task. She said she felt threatened. Oh please. Does she really feel threatened every time somebody wags a finger at her? She must lead a rather dull life.

But no, actually she doesn’t. She’s a defense attorney and probably has had to deal with all sorts of criminals. And she felt threatened by Brent, who at worst is a clown? It was simply not believable. Indeed, I think Stacy herself realized that she went overboard and tried to cool things off later when she took back the “threatened” statement. However, it came up again in the Boardroom and she ran with it. Trump didn’t buy it, neither do I. She lost her cool and exaggerated, and it came back to haunt her.

Nobody will ever say Stacy failed at the third rule, having a backbone. She certainly spoke up for herself – even if somebody else was talking at the time!

But she didn’t do well with the fourth rule, falling into the same trap as Pepi did. She thought she could scheme and plot her way through the Boardroom, blaming everything on Brent even though he didn’t make the decisions (or fail to make the decisions) that led to the team’s loss. She encouraged the rest of her team to target Brent in the Boardroom, failing to see that she was much more vulnerable herself because of her own behavior and decisions.

She also failed in the fifth rule, playing well with others. We’ve already noted the way she interrupted and acted when it came to Brent. Sometimes, people just don’t get along and rub each other the wrong way. But in business, you have to learn to deal with such people and be professional. While the case could certainly be made that Brent failed in this rule, Stacy did as well – and she was the one who made a federal case out of it, not Brent. While Brent took his grievance with her private, she took it to the group as a whole and disrupted everybody. Pepi was to blame for not roping them back in, but she really created the problems.

One part of the problem was that Stacy was so focused on Brent that she lost sight of the big picture. The goal of being on The Apprentice is not to make one specific person on your team look bad, it’s to make yourself look good and get hired! As such, if somebody on your team is making an ass of themselves, let them. Don’t get into fight. What’s the old saying? Don’t wrestle with a pig, because the pig likes it and you’ll just end up muddy? Something like that, anyway. The point is that by fighting with Brent, Stacy just made herself look bad, which not only hurt her chance for long-term success, but short-term as well!

I mentioned near the top of the article that we would talk more about her picking the wrong location, and the seventh rule is the time for that. Stacy failed to comprehend that the point of the challenge was simple: Get people to send text messages. Making people stop and listen to an ad campaign is difficult enough, but getting them to do so while they’re rushing around through the busy New York streets is even worse! While the other team figured out that they needed a captive audience, Stacy didn’t appear to think of that. She just picked a busy corner and hoped for the best. She didn’t get it.

The eighth rule says to be creative, but not insane. Was Brent insane? Could be. But was Stacy creative? Not that we saw. Well, other than her creativity when it came to the truth about Brent supposedly threatening her, and then later claiming she didn’t use that word. But that isn’t exactly the type of creativity Trump is looking for.

Ninth is to be more than one-dimensional. We saw relatively little of Stacy in the short time she was there, but what we did see didn’t exactly show any dimensions to her abilities, so we’ll have to give her a failing grade there as well.

The tenth and final rule says to use common sense. Stacy did not show an abundance of this ability, to say the least. Cutting off people you’re supposed to be working with defies common sense. Starting a big fight over a little thing defies common sense. Trying to get busy New Yorkers to stop for almost no reason really defies common sense. And claiming to Trump that she felt threatened by decidedly non-threatening Brent went over the top, especially given her line of work.

Stacy did not really come across as a very nice person. But worse than that, she made poor choices. What is key in business? Location, location, location. And Stacy picked the wrong one, showing poor understanding of what she needed to do. Beyond that, she made herself look weak to Trump by claiming to feel threatened by Brent – and made herself look like a liar by switching her story back and forth as to whether she really was threatened or not. Trump doesn’t need a person with any of these qualities as his next Apprentice, so with three of them in one person, we have the answer as to why Stacy lost.

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

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