Tuesday, March 24th, 2009, 3:27 pm
Finally, a non-crackberry, non-gender-specific task for Athena and
KOTU! Handling a product launch is a tough task. How did the teams do?
Lesson One: Talking the talk is one thing; walking the walk is another.
Clint Black talks a good game about the importance of being a good
follower. But when push came to shove (almost literally), Clint
resented not have his musical talents utilized by project manager Brian
McKnight, who took center stage.
Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman talked
a lot about being a championship team player, but then he walked off
after a tirade and didn't come back until the next morning.
Be careful about verbalizing your philosophy so loudly -- you may have to back up your lip with your life.
Lesson Two: Don't indulge in "girly hate."
Speaking of backing up your lip with your life ... Claudia Jordan
declared herself to be the perfect project manager because she's "good
at managing people."
Oh, really?
My original assessment
of her as immature got abundant support from her performance this
week. She shut down the one person who has production experience
(Melissa Rivers) simply because she didn't like her.
Brian
McKnight, meanwhile, has a tougher call to make: whether to allow
Dennis Rodman to contribute as a team member after walking away minutes
into the task. (Ivanka Trump seems to think he should. But she didn't
see the blowup.)
The best bosses are good at assessing their
team members' strengths and then clearing the roadblocks to enable them
to contribute their best work. It's not about who they "like."
Claudia,
instead, indulged in what I call "girly hate." In my experience, women
tend to hate one another much more personally than men. Let some other
women hack us off, and suddenly everything -- from her taste in shoes
to what-the-heck-is-her-colorist-thinking? -- becomes suspect.
Melissa
Rivers didn't bow down low enough or fast enough, and suddenly
everything from her mannerisms to her [alleged] plastic surgery became
a target for Claudia's ridicule.
Don Trump Jr. was right -
Claudia needed to step outside her emotional reaction to make personnel
assessments. But she lacked the maturity to see this.
Well, if the set of Deal or No Deal is like Claudia times 50, Howie Mandel has my utmost sympathy ... and respect.
Lesson Three: Consider your limitations.
The women almost tripped over something that plagued the women's team
from last season: trying to do more than time allowed.
<http://my.nbc.com/blogs/BusinessBroad/main/2008/01/18/celebrity-apprentice-week-2-tv-commercial>
The
men pulled off a video shoot at West Point in spite of the time
limitations. But they focused more of their energy on the stage show
closer to home.
The result? A home run for the beleaguered men's team.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS:
* Dennis Rodman reminding us all how many championships he's won. I thought those were won by teams?
*
"You know those red carpet extravaganzas over the last 12 years? I
produced those." "Congratulations." Butter wouldn't have melted in
Claudia's mouth.
* Annie Duke's dead-on assessment that she didn't know which was worse: Claudia's lack of control or Khloe's failure to step up.
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: NAPSAC Foundation <www.napsac.us>
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: Youthville USA <www.youthvilleusa.com>
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009, 3:03 pm
The task this week: selling wedding dresses. Tom Green's managing the men; Brande Roderick is PM for the women.
I
personally don't like that this is a "crackberry task," because the
women's strategy shaped up much better than the men's, and it ended up
paying off. But I love the one-hour episode. Really, guys, this is
SOOOO much tighter and entertaining.
And I'm kind of shocked
that Donald Trump suspended his usual M.O. for the firing, not even
allowing Tom Green to name two people to come back. Trump was furious.
Lesson One: Create an emotional selling environment.
The men thought a "clearance sale" look would somehow be compelling.
The women, however, understood how emotional the process of picking out
a wedding dress really is.
Melissa Rivers leveraged her contacts
and brought in a master stylist to create a beautiful store. The men
went for the minimalist look, to say the least.
Lesson Two: Lead by example. Tom Green just shot himself in the foot over and over again because he misunderstood the whole idea of "leadership."
It
was bad enough he didn't lead the charge in bringing in cash donations
from his contacts. But when he went drinking with Dennis Rodman (who
already had a head start with the vodka and cranberries that afternoon
during his "human billboard" stunt) and failed to show up on time the
next morning, that sunk him for good.
When you've got the title
of leader, you have to be seen as the hardest worker -- the first to
show up, the last to leave, and the one running the hardest in between
-- to earn your team's respect.
Leading does not mean simply telling people what to do.
Lesson Three: Communicate, communicate, communicate. I swear, I don't get Dennis Rodman.
I keep hearing people (including Trump) talk about how brilliant he is. Really, people?
No answer he gives makes any sense to me. It's all double-talk and defensiveness.
And
at no point was this more evident than when he simply failed to answer
Ivanka's question about why he didn't answer the door when Tom knocked
or otherwise tell anyone he was sick.
Tom was almost as bad. If
he was knocking down Dennis' door trying to get him up, why didn't he
call the rest of the team to explain his absence? They've all got cell
phones.
Most people aren't clairvoyant. If they need to know something, you have to tell them. It's common sense.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS
"I
think [Tom's] one of those creative people who's a **** and you just
have to deal with it." Once again, Jesse James nails it.
"It wasn't a cat, it was some girl named Kitty." Meow!
"If
this were my company, I would make [Dennis] produce three doctors [to
substantiate his illness]." After all the defensiveness Dennis put up
about his alleged allergic reaction (which looked suspiciously like a
hangover), that pretty much summed it up.
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: Butch Walts and Donald Skinner Urologic Cancer Research Foundation <no website found>
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: California Police Youth Charities <http://www.calpyc.com/>
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009, 11:16 pm
Season Two seems to have learned one of the most important lessons of Season One: don't do too many "crackberry tasks." The celebrities are getting tested in some good ways ... so far.
So what can we learn?
Lesson One: Nothing is as important as your health. I'm all for doing whatever it takes to meet a deadline. But Annie Duke's objection to Claudia Jordan taking an early night in to get over a sudden illness in time for a crucial presentation was just uncalled for.
The team needed Claudia to be up and at 'em for an important part of the presentation. If she needed a little more rest than the other team members because of an extenuating circumstance, then the rest of the team could pick up the slack and pull together.
That's why they call it a team, Annie.
As a former boss once told me when I apologized for taking three days off for surgery, "There's never anything going on in this office that's more important than your health."
Donald Trump may not agree. The good news is, he doesn't have to for it to be the right perspective.
Lesson Two: Tap abilities, not personalities. Both project managers failed to do a cold-blooded analysis of their team members' respective strengths and weaknesses and assign roles accordingly.
Khloe Kardashian was content to let people volunteer for whatever role they wanted, regardless of their talents or experience. Joan Rivers would have been perfect to script the presentation, but steamroller Annie snatched the task right from under her.
Scott Hamilton had even bigger problems. He allowed the personality conflict between himself and Tom Green to get in the way of utilizing Tom in an appropriate role. Scott was focused on shutting Tom down rather than redirecting Tom's considerable creative energies in a productive direction (admittedly, quite a tall order).
Then, when it came time to staff the presentation, Tom was so resentful of how he had been ignored the previous day he was reluctant to contribute.
And if that wasn't enough, Scott allowed his buddies Clint Black and Dennis Rodman to engage in much of the same disruptive conduct he accused Tom Green of.
Here's the difference: Khloe (to my suprise, frankly) grew into the role and learned from her mistakes. Scott just kept hammering away at the same ineffective methods all day long.
The fruit of that became the defining mistake of the men's team: the failed EEE concept Scott insisted on. Buh-bye, Scott!
Lesson Three: Pick your battles ... and your timing. I have to admit, I'd written off Claudia last episode as spoiled and immature. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe.
When Melissa Rivers claimed credit for the character concept in front of Donald Trump Jr., Claudia bit her tongue, wisely acknowledging that perhaps this wouldn't be the time or place to start that fight.
I was grateful when, later, Khloe clarified that it was Claudia who initially came up with the "skeleton" of the idea everybody else built onto.
[Interestingly, Melissa Rivers says creative editing is to blame for the perception that the Mizz Z character was Claudia's idea first, not hers. In this entertainment genre, that's a distinct possibility.]
Lesson Four: Not every people problem is character-driven. It's easy when you clash with someone to impugn their character - their motives, their psychology, etc. Some of the clashes this season, however, may have simpler explanations.
For instance, Annie Duke has raised everybody's hackles, and we've barely gotten past the second episode. Her problem, however, may not be so much arrogance as a difference in negotiating style.
Annie has shown a tendency to negotiate, to use linquist Deborah Tannen's language, from the inside out. That is, she starts off with "we need to do this and this and this," then waits for others to voice objections.
Problem is, this is a very male style of negotiating. Women tend to negotiate from the outside in instead, asking for others' opinions and circling around to find a group consensus.
Neither style is "correct." They're both valid. The problem arises when a group expects one style and one member engages in the other style (as Annie has done).
The result? Everybody sees Annie as arrogant, and she's completely mystified by their response.
I'm not saying her approach couldn't use some work -- lots of work, in fact. But so could everybody else's expectations.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS:
"Together we're a set!" Even in the midst of a boardroom fight, you gotta love that Tom and Scott could joke about their shared cancer battle.
"I've never talked about comics with a Playboy Playmate before." And the needle on the geek-o-meter just went WHAM!
Claudia pointing out that perhaps Mr. Trump thought Brande Roderick had appeared in Playboy more than two times because he kept reading the same issue over and over. Gotcha!
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: The Brent Shapiro Foundation for Alcohol and Drug Awareness
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Saturday, March 7th, 2009, 5:37 pm
Since none of these celebrities, as far as we know, needs a job with The Donald, the appeal with the celebrity version of The Apprentice is the money won for charity. Important, too, is the exposure each charity gets from being featured on national television.
But how well are these charities represented?
I don't mean "represented" in terms of whether the celebrity is a worthy spokesperson. That's a discussion for another day.
What I mean is, how well does each celebrity sell his/her charity in the video appeal for support?
I remember, early in the first season, being struck by how personal some of the connections between celebrity and charity were in some cases ... and how relatively flat and impersonal others were.
For example, Piers Morgan's sponsorship of The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund was centered on his brother and brother-in-law's service in Irag and Afghanistan. Trace Adkins' selection of the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network was inspired by his daughter Brianna's fight against life-threateningly severe food allergies.
Most of the others, however, failed to hit the sweet spot. While both Carol Alt and Gene Simmons worked for children's charities (the Tony Alt Memorial Fund and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation), neither articulated a clear personal connection (Alt's "my late brother really loved children" notwithstanding).
A lot of times, the candidates fell back on the tired "it's a great organization and it helps a lot of people" line. Not exactly a Unique Selling Proposition.
It seems odd to me the producers of a reality TV show would show a real weakness here. After all, this species is especially notorious for emotional manipulation in the name of "good TV."
Clearly, Mark Burnett's crew can starve, sleep-deprive and slave-drive a bunch of fake job candidates into dialing up the drama for the camera. So how come they can't coach these same people into dialing it up for something that really matters?(I do have to say, second season seems to be doing better in this regard than first -- most of the appeals have better emotional "hooks." But that doesn't mean there's not still room for improvement.)Just because nobody asked for my opinion doesn't mean I'm not willing to give it. (I'm nice that way.) So here's what I'm suggesting:
Don't just name it, describe it. Okay, I think we all understand the basic concept of cancer, so Tom Green is off the hook (in more ways than one). But Rett Syndrome? Never heard of it. No idea why it would kill someone.
And while Clint Black makes the personal connection with his 16-year-old niece's death and makes a passing reference to how often it's misdiagnosed, I walk away from Clint's video as uneducated (and, unfortunately, uninspired) as I was when I hit the play button.
I'm not asking for a bunch of medical terminology here. And I'm not expecting some long gut-wrenching tale about someone's illness and/or death, either.
But I think Vincent Pastore hit just the right note, albeit not in his charity appeal video. After Hydra won a challenge under his leadership, Vinnie said briefly that his charity, the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, raised funds for the disease that killed his daughter's stepfather, a man who had been healthy as a horse but died within months after diagnosis. It was emotional without being maudlin.
Why you? Why them? Why this? When there's a family connection, the answers to those questions are fairly obvious. Absent that, an explanation is in order.
"Explanation," however, may be too weak a word here. "Picture" is more to the point.
Annie Duke's appeal for her charity, Refugees International, isn't bereft of heart-tugging pictures: hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Sudan, huddled together in ill-equipped refugee camps without food, medicine or pure water.
But when Annie said she had a real interest in the Sudan region, I sat up, expecting a personal story to explain that connection. Has she visited the area? Is she acquainted with any of the victims or aid workers? What put this area on her radar?
We never find out. That's a shame.
In contrast, when Trace Adkins talks about the "mad dashes" he and his wife have made to the emergency room with their daughter, it creates a vivid mental picture of panicked parents and a suffering child. You understand why he wants to raise money for FAAN -- and you want to help.
It's just as important to get a portrait of how the charity is helping. Piers Morgan's visit to the Center for the Intrepid -- "They make prosthetics that enable amputees to run. To run." -- succeeded in illustrating what those hundreds of thousands of dollars were going for.
It made you feel good about participating -- as a viewer -- in what otherwise would be just another television show. And isn't that the point?
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009, 6:21 pm
It's the new Celebrity Apprentice. But now it's two hours. And sixteen people. All with major egos.
And I'm back to extract the lessons from each episode.
The more things change, the more things stay the same,huh?
Lesson One: Thin skins bruise easily. Annie Duke established herself as a strong personality (how's that for a softened euphemism?) on Athena early on, much to the chagrin of chicklets like Khloe Kardashian.
Granted, Annie clearly believes "tact" is a four letter word. While she may have been a go-getter who was right about the facts, her presentation could clearly use work. For instance, on the whole cupcake frosting thing, she could have taken the attitude of "here's what the chef showed me - let's all do it this way so they all turn out the same."
But her abrasive manner raised the hackles on Claudia Jordan, who had to remind everyone in the boardroom she's a grown woman who knows how to frost a freakin' cupcake, thank you very much.
What darling Claudia needs to understand is that mental toughness isn't just about copping a 'tude - it's about achieving a high level of emotional self-management that enables you to deal with difficult situations and personalities effectively.
I would humbly suggest her next step in her progression toward that goal would be to learn how to take direction without hoisting her perfect little butt up onto her shoulders.
Lesson Two: Speak up, stupid! Stop me if you've heard this -- doesn't it always seem that the people who talk the most end up taking (or being given) the reins?
Herschel Walker got the first PM job simply because he was willing to speak up and guide the discussion. And while Joan Rivers was the women's PM, her daughter Melissa Rivers and Annie Duke talked their way into positions of unofficial authority pretty quickly.
We've all seen it -- anyone who's ever worked in a team environment knows the truth of a recent study at Berkeley showing that those who speak up the most are perceived as leaders, whether they're right or not.
Those seething with silent resentment may be more in the right, but they will get left behind if they don't start inserting themselves into the conversation.
Lesson Three: There is no "I" in "team." While the women were fighting for control, the men were trying to get certain team members (I'm not naming names, but their initials are Dennis Rodman and Andrew "Dice" Clay) to contribute anything at all.
The Diceman declared he was going to do his own thing his own way, and if he couldn't play it that way, he was going to pick up his ball and bat and go home. The Donald was all too happy to accommodate him.
Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman installed himself as the shop steward of the Whiners and Slackasses Union for the KOTU team. The Donald wasn't buying that, either. When Rodman wailed that he was "always the victim," Trump shut him down in a heartbeat: "Don't do that **** with me, Dennis."
Predictably, one of the weaker links got sent home. I suspect we'll have several weeks of unsurprising firings before we really start to have a horse race.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS
* Brande Roderick: "Who said size doesn't matter?"
Claudia Jordan: "The small one."
* Joan Rivers naming Brande as the star player on Athena. If [Annie's] looks could have killed ...
* The Diceman's constant reminders of how he is THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STANDUP COMIC EVER. (This is probably news to Eddie Murphy.)
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: Stand Up for Kids <www.standupforkids.org>
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: God's Love We Deliver <www.godslovewedeliver.org>
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