The Apprentice: Los Angeles – Why Aaron Lost

I’d like to examine why it is that Tim and Nicole were the two who most vocally suggested Aaron should go. To do so, let’s skip to the eighth rule. That one says applicants must be creative, but not insane. While we don’t know for sure whose idea it was to send people out looking for bulk sales of honey, I’m going to guess it was Aaron. Why? Because I think Tim and Nicole are smarter than to try to sell honey to gas stations. And also because I believe this lies at the heart of why they pointed at Aaron. I mean, who buys honey at a gas station? That may be one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard, and definitely goes beyond “creative” to the “insane” category. Aaron had two of his best people out wasting their time. Maybe he thought it was another bold move like the bulk sales for the chicken bowl, but it wasn’t – it was just silly.

Moving back to the fifth rule, we see that contestants are supposed to play well with others. Aaron didn’t have any problem here that we saw. After all, why would there be any conflict when he really didn’t tell people what to do?

Sixth is to focus on the long-term. Frankly, I’m not sure what Aaron was focused on. It wasn’t sales. It wasn’t marketing. It wasn’t leading. Sometimes he seemed to be focused on outer space. And as we’ve discussed, when he had a chance to make a positive impression on Trump that might help him out in the long run, he sat in the Boardroom and barely uttered a peep.

The seventh rule reminds players to understand the challenge. The honey task had two main focuses: sales and marketing. Being a one-day challenge in a supermarket, marketing would have had to be something special to get them in and buying honey. After all, it’s… honey. That’s where the difference lies between this task and the chicken bowl one. They seem superficially similar – the idea was to sell as much of one particular product as possible. But they were allowed to be creative and make their own new product for the chicken bowl task. Here, no matter how they packaged it, it was still honey.

The key factor here was sales. They had to convince people they wanted honey, that they needed honey. This meant attracting attention specifically to the salespeople and getting the honey off the shelves and into customers’ baskets. Kinetic did a good job of this, with both Derek in the beekeeper suit and Angela making use of her Olympic status. Arrow… didn’t. What made it worse was that Aaron didn’t even want to be a part of sales, and he’s a salesman!

Since we already addressed the eighth rule, let’s look at the ninth. This actually leads nicely from the previous point, as it says you can’t be one-dimensional. With a background in sales, the worry might have been that Aaron would focus too much on that. Ha! No problem there. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t make up for it with performance somewhere else. He didn’t show us marketing, business savvy, or leadership. So that would be zero dimensions instead of even one.

The tenth rule brings us to using common sense. I think we’ve pretty well hit on all the nonsensical things Aaron did – such as sending people to gas stations to try to get bulk sales, and not wanting to do sales on a sales-oriented task even when he wasn’t doing anything else.

As you might have noticed, we spent the most time talking about Aaron’s lack of leadership. Yes, his team won twice when he was project manager. But winning isn’t everything (as I suspect Aimee will find out next week). Aaron never showed himself to be a good leader. He gave little or no direction, and some of the decisions he did make were rather bad ones. To add to his lack of leadership, he really didn’t seem to do anything else, either! That is why Aaron lost.

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

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