The Apprentice 5 Weekly Performance Review, Episode 7 & 8

Charmaine: Charmaine did a good thing in telling Lenny they needed to prepare for the meeting with the judges/execs, even if the words were not heard. She did ask one question of them, which was almost a majority. However, she had the wrong name for their program, showing her own lack of preparation.

However, Charmaine doesn’t know when to stop talking. In his aside Tarek made it clear that her chatter was “mindless,” and Lenny made similar statements her face. She represented herself pretty well in the boardroom when Lenny attacked her, but adding an extra comment after Trump sends her out of the boardroom and back to the suite, that was unnecessary.

Charmaine was responsible for setting the price for the sandwich. Also, she wouldn’t agree to let Lee’s customer get the sandwiches at $2. Pricing is where they lost the task. As I said above, the task was not about profitability and a lower price did them no harm. In this respect I don’t think she understood the task.

Charmaine’s rating is NEEDS IMPROVEMENT. She’s annoying her teammates and is rather fortunate Lenny did such a horrible job this week.

Lee: We saw a lot of Lee tonight. Some of it was impressive and some of it was… not.

In the second task, his idea of having all the other sandwiches removed was brilliant. Also, he correctly knew that no one pays that much money for a sandwich at 7-Eleven. And in the first task, he stepped in to help a struggling Lenny with the presentation.

But his best move was the big sandwich deal he almost closed. I thought of Sam in season one, trying to sell a glass of lemonade for $1,000. However, the task is not rated on profit, just volume and Lee should have closed that deal for any price.

His biggest failure in my mind was what Trump rewarded as loyalty, and I refer to his overt defense of Lenny. Well, Rebecca showed us last season that Trump praises that trait extremely highly. However, to me it indicates that he didn’t realize what had actually happened for them to lose the task. And at the top of the second episode, he made it clear in his conversation with Charmaine that he values friendship over performance.

Riding about town with Lenny, lost in his hometown while labor was definitely the most critical resource, that was not good either.

Back on the plus side, his attempts to coach Lenny were commendable, even if Lenny didn’t seem to want to hear the very valid suggestions that Lee made. However, that conversation ended with Lee volunteering to go into the boardroom and that’s never, ever a good idea. And in the second task, as a local Lee offered his expertise about the area they were assigned.

In the second boardroom, Leslie highlighted his lack of support for his leader. It’s time for Lee to play the game a little less and just try to get a win. Plus, his continued talking over Leslie just gave me a headache.

It’s hard to rate Lee this week as he did something that, taken alone, could justify all the possible ratings. I’ll settle on a midpoint, SATISFACTORY.

Tarek: Tarek worked very hard in the first task. This shows teamwork, a quality that hasn’t been fully evident this season.

In the second task, he didn’t have much luck getting people to respond to the trivia questions. When he started saying how the sandwich would alter reality, that was foolish and made him look as psycho as Martha’s Apprentice Jim did selling marmalade.

Tarek’s rating is SATISFACTORY.

Leslie: Finally, Leslie was forced to be PM. We saw good reasons why she had been avoiding the position. Mind you, an increase of over 600% is pretty good!

Reminding me again of Jenn and the movie Zathura, she mispronounced the product name consistently as “pizza” instead of “P’eatzza.”

Trivia questions were a bad idea, and the time she and Tarek spent on trivia questions was a waste. No one goes into the store to answer boring and impossible trivia questions about cheese. What were they going to give the winner(s), an extra lunch bag?

One thing she did right was to call the store staff together to be sure they understood exactly how the promotion was going to work. This was a stark contract to earlier this season where models didn’t understand the vehicles they were promoting.

I got the feeling she was determined not to listen to any suggestion of Lee’s. When he reports that the store managers think the price is way too high, that requires action, not denial.

I think her attack of Lee in the boardroom was ill advised. They had four people in the store pushing the product, another body offered limited returns. The time he spent almost closing the big deal – which was NOT “shady,” I might add – was time well spent and should have been the winning margin.

Her rating must be UNACCEPTABLE, not only for leading a losing effort but even more so, for avoiding the limelight all season.

Lenny: I think you’ll find this section surprisingly brief. Lenny did everything wrong this week, and whenever things had a chance to improve, he made them worse. I even stopped taking notes after twenty minutes because the volume of “bad Lenny” comments was too great. Clearly, an UNACCEPTABLE rating has been well earned.

Lenny was on thin ice, and he fell through. Future contestants should review Lenny’s boardroom performance. There are many examples of “behaviors to avoid” that should be committed to memory.

Final Comment:

We’re half way through the season and, you know what… I feel a poll coming on! I’d like to include a couple of reader questions so tell me, what should I ask?

Brian lives in Toronto, where he can be reached at uncle_bto@rogers.com. He spent a couple of decades working in middle management at The Prudential, primarily hiding behind the coffee machine to avoid his pointy-haired bosses. He’d like to hear your opinions and promises to respond to all serious email! Or, write him if you’d like to know what 100 billion seconds works out to!

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