Posted on 01/19/2005 8:46:41 PM PST by ClintonBeGone
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Season III Premiere thread of
"The Apprentice"
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This Season: Book Smarts versus Street Smarts
I noticed that too. I suppose I'd getting snippy too *lol* The pack rat idea was great too but I wouldn't like opening up that thing with my mountains of paper on top!
If I had been in the focus group, I would have asked them to come up with a product that provides the most flat surfaces possible for my piles.
Now that they're down to the final four, I'm looking for Tana to win. Alex is just blah, Craig is off in left field much of the time, and Kendra is too immature. Tana is head and shoulders above the other three, even though she does seem to be a bit too impressed with herself. What do you think?
I concur. I hope they start fighting or something *lol*
Kendra is about as immature as they come. She reminds me of someone I worked with in a group setting. Smart, reasonably productive, but she had an extremely hard time with criticism and when something didn't go her way. Both tend to lash out first, and that's not good for anyone.
When last we were in Vegas (early March) I saw a sign opposite the new Wynn Las Vegas edifice with the Trump logo saying something like 'New condominiums coming soon', IIRC. It's where the Frontier Hotel is currently.
Wow I see I'm not the only one who thought Trump would can them both.
Agreed. His communication skills are horrendous.
This was a rather joyless episode. Bren and Alex are just tone-deaf. Alex showed energy in the boardroom and Bren didn't. That was the difference. Bren knew it was time to go home. You're seeing people now where fatigue is obviously getting to them. Angie looked wiped out when she was fired. Chris, typically, went into breakdown mode. Bren looked drained this week.
Whatever you want to say against Craig (and there's a lot), this is twice now he's had to PM a task where something needed to be built and he went against the grain of his own group and still built something that won the task and received rave reviews (the Home Depot "box" being the other). FWIW, I wasn't overly impressed with either but he somehow pulls it off. Alex at least thought outside the box even though his product definitely needed more tweaking.
(btw, if Trump was in the business of re-inventing box-like objects, Craig should definitely be his guy).
Alex's strength is his creativity. He's a sharp guy but he just doesn't get enough feedback before he plows ahead with his ideas. And he doesn't seem to work as hard when he's not the PM as he does when it's his turn. He also needs to focus better whenever there are cute girls around. I feel he's been the principal reason for the last two losses.
Tana is obviously a top seller and a great closer. I just don't know if she will mesh well in a large organization though and, at some point, her lack of education will be a problem for her, maybe at the interview stage.
Kendra is the candidate that has done the best but she has yet to face the pressure of the boardroom (Tana did once but it was a long time ago and she really wasn't seriously threatened). What is bad about Kendra is her reaction to criticism. She whines and pouts rather than handling conflicts constructively or fighting back. I don't think she is as fiesty as Tana and I think Trump likes candidates who are fiesty (see Shelton, Chris).
I don't see how Tana and Kendra aren't the final two but I really don't know who is going to win. I think it's all going to come down to Trump's personal preference and not on solid credentials.
Oh, I did have one good laugh and that's when Craig and Kendra are having their little spat while Tana calmly sits there and eats her sandwich. I get the impression she is secretly loving the tension these two are causing each other.
My wife came up with what I thought was a good theory at the beginning of last week's show: Trump is firing all the "personalities" first. Whether the person has a good or bad personality, Trump just doesn't want anyone working for him who sticks out like a sore thumb. Going on that assumption, it was easy to predict Chris would get fired last week and Bren this week. Who's next? We're getting down to the most bland, milquetoast candidates now, but Craig kind of sticks out in my mind.
That's a great gadget he developed. I'm going to buy one.
Oh dear. I fell asleep as the teams were discussing what their products would be and woke up as Bren drove away in a cab. What did each team make? Were the teams close in results? Why did Craig and Kendra fight? (I saw tiff in previews).
Bren was not going to win, no matter what he did last night. Based on past performance, Tana seems the most likely winner to me. Of course there's still time for her to foul up royally. Though Craig and Kendra are both creative, they are not organizers of people.
I read somewhere that Magna's creation was actually something already invented and patented. When lawyers Bren and Alex found out, they protested their "loss" but were overruled. This may partly explain Bren's demeanor in the boardroom. He was exhausted from already fighting this loss before the cameras started rolling.
I would be interested in reading that article. It seems like a wimpy thing for Bren and Alex to argue because it never came up during the design of their product - that they were limited to only ideas not invented.
There's no article, just scuttlebutt. But, to carry the argument to an extreme, what if Magna had introduced the paper clip or the stapler? Sure, they help keep your desk organized by keeping items attached to each other.
"But, that's already been invented and patented."
"Well, still it was a great idea and the demonstration was so good..."
See? They're arguing that Magna didn't create anything that wasn't already available.
I must say I'm beginning to get a little suspicious of some of these episodes. After the "Dove disaster", I think a lot of companies got ahold of the producers of the show and said "that better not happen to us". So, they may have planted some winning ideas, especially after they both created meatball pizzas for Domino's when Domino's wanted them to "invent" the cheeseburger pizza they were obviously ready to launch.
So perhaps we are being led to believe that Kendra designed the perfect brochure for Pontiac and Craig came up with a four-sided spinning organizer for Staples when, in reality,
both were handed the idea and they just pretended to create them.
I have no proof but it's an idea to consider. This show is becoming a one-hour ad for product launches and I'll bet some of these companies are unwilling to leave it to chance that Trump's group of flunkies is going to come up with an idea that makes the "sponsor" look good.
Trump's an idiot. I distinctly remember a show in either season 1 or 2 where he all but railed against risk taking.
I think you're own to something.
The totally stupid thing about the pizza deal was that Trump told them before they went out that he liked Meatball pizza. Then in the next episode, he said they shouldn't have created it.
This guy is a fraud, and this show is essentially a shrine to his ego.
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