The Apprentice 5 Weekly Performance Review, Episode 9

Allie led the group who doubted that Andrea actually sold as much as she claimed. This makes me question Allie’s bookkeeping and accounting skills. Did she not track the money as she received it through the day, or did she just empty her pockets at the end of the days and say, “Hmm, looks like we sold $843 worth of books!”

Also in the boardroom, Allie showed further inconsistency when she said she gets along with everyone. This, after slagging Andrea for the whole second half of the show!

I’m assigning Allie an UNSATISFACTORY rating. This was not a good showing for her at all.

Roxanne: Roxanne did well in telling Sean he needed to rethink his experiences with Andrea and to make his own decision. She had the appearance of being reasonable while anticipating the result would be favorable.

In the boardroom Roxanne’s stock rose as Trump remembered she had previously expressed doubts about Andrea’s abilities, and she reiterated that without becoming mean-spirited. The Donald complimented her verbal presentation skills in the boardroom, which is never a bad thing either.

Probably her best move this week was suggesting that they change location to actually be on Ellis Island. I suspect they could make sales to people who just saw the exhibits, were impressed, and were about to return to the mainland. For that, I’ll assign a SATISFACTORY rating to Roxanne.

Sean: Sean was not as much in evidence this week, and I was tempted to assign NO RATING. Then they had their pre-boardroom discussions.

For me, the most disconcerting thing about Sean was that he never saw Andrea’s obvious shortcomings. Perhaps he hasn’t been on the receiving end, but her constant questioning of her PMs, her dictatorial style of leadership and her poor sales skills are all things he’s either seen or mentioned before.

Sean insists on playing the game without backstabbing. That’s noble, but others don’t play that way and I’m concerned about Sean’s evaluation skills. Even though Ivanka agreed with him, he’s mistaken if he thought Andrea could be managed by Allie (or any of them). I assign him a NEEDS IMPROVEMENT rating.

Tammy: Finally, a Tammy sighting on this show, and what does she do? After spending hours taking copious notes in preparation for a potentially nice little “text creation” task, she leaves this key material behind. It resulted in her and her PM being removed from the task for several hours. And as stated above, this problem snowballed until it developed into the primary reason they lost.

Maybe Tammy was better off being under the radar, it’s a NEEDS IMPROVEMENT rating for her. Warning, next week it’s her turn to take the lead. Will she? Will we finally find out if Tammy is a contender or a pretender?

Andrea: Uncompromising Andrea got evicted from Trump Island this week. The way the others ganged up on her and got the result they wanted reminded me more of Survivor or Big Brother than The Apprentice. I was actually rather surprised, in that it’s unusual for Trump to bail out on someone he felt was “a star” so quickly.

This was a representative effort for Andrea, though. Even when she did something right (like pointing out to Allie that resources were being wasted), it was done in such a heavy-handed, off-putting manner that she loses more points than she gained.

Andrea didn’t see why Tammy was writing so many notes from the tour guide and just wanted to create a package based on the available free pamphlets. Well, if one is going to charge people for a product, it really ought to have some value of its own.

Andrea’s questionable sales skills were not really a factor in this task. Now, no one knows what the true sales numbers are, but let’s do a little arithmetic. If she did indeed sell the $210 worth of books she claimed to have sold, at $5 apiece that’s only 42 books. Selling at $3 each, the competition sold over 500 books each. So even if Andrea doubled her output, it’s still no contest.

The eleventh-hour asking of permission to attempt some large-volume bulk sales was a good idea, but it came far too late considering it’s supposed to be another of her areas of expertise.

Always-right Andrea must have loved it that she could be in control of creating the book while Allie was stuck on Ellis Island, but not so much when Allie expressed her displeasure when she finally returned.

In the boardroom segment, it was hard to tell whether Trump or Andrea was more surprised to hear that Andrea isn’t a “star” or a sales wizard. In fact, I was very surprised that after she eavesdropped on the others and knew their intentions, she didn’t perform better in there. Perhaps her lack of experience in an Apprentice boardroom was a factor, but she seemed totally unprepared to aggressively defend herself.

I was amused when in the boardroom she admitted that her frequently touted skills in sales, printing, and graphic design actually meant hiring people with those skills! That does explain that ugly and cluttered Post cereal banner. However, it also shows that she clearly misrepresented her skills to her teammates.

Trump is looking for someone who is a leader, but this person also has to work within the corporate structure of Trump Enterprises. Andrea consistently showed a lack of support for her teammates that she would never tolerate from them.

As for a rating, no more games, Andrea’s always been UNACCEPTABLE. No wonder she works for herself. I did have some perverse fun writing that maybe she could win, as most of you readers who write to me and everyone else here at RealityNewsOnline found her to be quite annoying.

Final Comment:

There was an interesting tidbit of info that slipped in one of the commercial breaks, that over a dozen countries now have their own version of The Apprentice, including Greece, South America, and Indonesia.

Finally, with ten of the initial eighteen contestants gone, it’s time for a brief, non-serious, and unscientific opinion poll. Click here to access the poll. It will be open until sometime Monday. I’ll tabulate the results and report them in next week’s article.

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!

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