Monday, January 28th, 2008, 3:22 pm
Okay, I have to say it -- losing the "Battle of the Sexes" on Celebrity Apprentice for the FOURTH FRICKIN' WEEK IN A ROW is really starting to annoy me. But, hey -- we did come close, and the women are starting to incorporate some lessons from prior weeks into their strategy.
Plus, the guys just continue to be entertaining as all get out.
So, class, what did we learn as the gang sold Broadway tickets this week?
Lesson One: Up your visibility-to-usefulness ratio. I have to say, Nely Galan's constant bleating about so-and-so's lack of "leadership potential" has really gotten on my nerves. But Carol Alt and Jennie Finch's penchant for taking what Carol refers to as the "garbage jobs" finally got somebody fired (namely, Jennie). They both stood in the booth and took orders (which somebody had to do, right?) and were hidden again.
By all means, be as productive as possible -- nobody likes a showboat who doesn't actually contribute something to the team. But don't let the Omarosas of the world shove you into a corner every single time and then refer to you as "sweet." Find ways to be visible.
Your survival depends on it.
Lesson Two: Know what your success metric is, and plan your efforts around it. Part of the fun of this season has been watching the two least, shall we say, macho members of the men's team start slugging it out for the Alpha Male position. And this round of that little fistfight proved both educational and entertaining.
Stephen Baldwin, in a misguided attempt to prove to Piers Morgan that he's "just as smart as [Piers] is," declares that he's not going to call his rich friends to ask them to purchase high-priced tickets because "the name of the game is to sell tickets."
Huh? What Stephen ignores is that success in this task is keyed to how much total money is raised, not the number of tickets sold. If they'd sold one ticket for $100,000, they'd have still beaten the women even if the women had sold 1,000 tickets for $50 a pop.
Clearly, it made sense for them to do both the street-value and high-roller sales. But to sit down on the job just to prove a point?
Childish. Or, to use the Mandarin pronunciation, stoo-pid.
Lesson Three: Don't be afraid to get loud. Here's another take on the "visibility" angle. The women, once again, seemed to be hiding behind the product. The men, on the other hand, used megaphones and costumes and every attention-getting device they could get their hands on.
But Nely seems to be taking this lesson to heart, to her credit. She "got loud" on the phone and called all her friends to come down and donate.
Had the one contact not lollygagged at the bank and missed the deadline, Nely would have single-handedly pulled out the women's first win, likely by a margin that would have made the guys wet themselves in shame.
I don't care what The Donald says, Nely, baby. You are a frickin' star.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS:
* Marilu Henner hitting the ground running. She was in her element, she knew the territory and how to exploit it (called producers and stars for support), and she even had Omarosa (who usually doesn't take direction well) eating out of her hand. Kudos!
* Stephen Baldwin's "boomerang" rant. Stephen, honey, last time I checked, "I know you are, but what am I" was a children's taunt. Dressing it in a Hugo Boss suit does not change that.
* Piers Morgan's "full James Bond charm offensive": "I think [Ivanka] found me oddly attractive in that chain mail." The key word there being "oddly" ...
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: The Breast Cancer Research Foundation <http://www.bcrfcure.org/>
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research <http://www.lustgarten.org>
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Friday, January 18th, 2008, 2:07 pm
What a week. What an upset.
No, the women didn't win. But the one person I thought would outlast most, if not all, his competitors, got fired. And he seemed to be just begging for a pink slip the whole time.
Frankly, I worry about how watchable this will really be without him (although the next couple of weeks look truly hilarious, based on the previews).
But time wounds all heels, and Gene Simmons got his.
Lesson One: If you play with other people's money, you play by other people's rules. To say Gene Simmons likes to play by his own rules is a lot like saying Genghis Khan was a little foul-tempered.
But Gene Simmons conveniently forgot The Other Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.
The Kodak people had a $20,000 stake in this task (if you don't count what they sank into Airstream trailers, etc.). They had every right to define the product being sold (in this case, an all-in-one inkjet printer/scanner/whatever), the chief benefit (cheaper ink), and the target market (people who want to print photos without spending a fortune).
Gene didn't want to hear any of that. He was too in love with his own brilliance to listen.
And it cost him ... and his charity. Big.
To be fair, his slogan ("It's a Kodak World. Welcome.") is, in my opinion, brilliant in terms of emotional appeal. And it works -- for the Kodak brand as a whole.
But it had little, if any, relevance to the product being sold, the benefit being advertised, or the market being reached.
Gene Simmons correctly identified his main strength as the ability to create a compelling emotional message. But he tried to recast the Kodak task in his own image, rather than finding a way to perfom it the way Kodak had already defined it.
Watching him drown in his own arrogance was one of the most satisfying schadenfreude moments I've seen. Ever.
Lesson Two: We women need to get over this "we" schtick. Every time the women hit the board room, I want to scream.
Not just because "my" side keeps turning in pathetic performances. It's our absolute refusal to point fingers when it's clearly appropriate.
Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, points out that, when speaking of accomplishments, men tend to use the singular first-person pronoun ("I boosted sales by 40%") even when the results came from group effort, while women tend to use the plural first-person pronoun ("We came in on time and under budget") even when the results can be attributed mostly to the speaker herself.
This "we" impulse comes from a good place. We girls want to give others credit, be inclusive, spread the love.
But I was tempted to hurl something at the screen when Carol Alt refused to point the finger at Nely Galan for being a motormouth during the Kodak meeting.
Trump asked her point-blank, "Who did too much talking?" To which Carol replied meekly, "We went in there as a team."
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! The truthful answer was that Nely did too much talking, and Carol failed to stop her. THAT'S correctly apportioning blame.
I may not be a member of the Omarosa fan club, but one thing the woman understands better than anybody else on that team is that, sometimes, it really does come down to individual performance. She's not afraid to say that one person failed and another person stepped up.
It's a lesson we could all stand to learn.
Lesson Three: Keep all sugared beverages away from computer equipment. Okay, show of hands -- who doesn't know better than this by now? I mean, really. Klutziness happens, people.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS:
* Stephen Baldwin's Red-Bull-fueled stream-of-consciousness concepting rant. Someone introduce this man to decaf. PLEASE.
* Ivanka Trump telling Gene Simmons that his high opinion of his own brilliance, even in the face of obvious defeat, "won't get you anywhere -- not in here." Revenge of The Daughter!
* Omarosa pointing out to Gene Simmons it might be a good idea for him to actually know the name of the product he's advertising. And then him writing it on his hand and still not remembering it. Classic.
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation <http://www.pedaids.org/>THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital <http://www.stjude.org>
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Friday, January 18th, 2008, 12:48 pm
Week 1 ended with what The Donald correctly referred to as a "drubbing" by Hydra against Team Empresario. So the question is, what will the women's team (with a bona fide media mogul at the helm) do with the task of producing a TV commercial?
Answer: Way, way too much.
Lesson One: Don't go too far on the first date. No, no, this hasn't morphed into a dating blog. But one of the biggest mistakes we women make in love gets made at work, too.
We're so eager to please. And this is a good thing. Right?
Um ... no. All that eagerness can (and usually does) backfire.
Nely Galan, Empresario's PM, correctly schedules a meeting with the Pedigree official to get his company's vision for the commercial. So far, so good (as we'll revisit later).
But Nely's not content to just produce a winning TV commercial. Oh, no. She's going for a web ad and a radio spot and on and on ...
To tie-in to the dating analogy, Empresario tries to give a porn star performance for someone who only wanted dinner and a movie.
All that energy ... all that female intensity ... ended up scaring the bejeebers out of the poor guy.
And because the women wasted too much time trying to overwhelm him, he still didn't get the one thing he really wanted: a great commercial.
Lesson Two: A little politicking goes a long way. Team Hydra, meanwhile, understood the limits of their task and their timeline. What they didn't understand was the human factor.
And by "they," I mean Gene Simmons, Hydra's PM. In all fairness, the other guys seemed to know better.
First, Gene decided to forego a client meeting. Since they had (a) a day to do what normally takes an ad agency weeks and (b) what looked like a creative brief of some sort already (everybody seemed to have typed pages in hand), that decision may be (somewhat) defensible.
But the sexist stunt Gene pulled with Ivanka ... made ... no ... sense. And then he compounded it by telling the Pedigree guy meeting with him was a waste of Hydra's time (inexplicably bolstering his case with a quote from Sun Tzu's Art of War).
In the 30 seconds or so it took Gene Simmons to make a fool of himself with both Ivanka and Pedigree, he could have come up with more politic explanations for his decisions. Instead, he was (as he acknowledged) "short-sighted."
Or, to use the Mandarin pronunciation, stoo-pid.
Lesson Three: Clients can't always articulate what they want. In a truly maddening twist, the women lost not only due to poor execution (trying to do too much in too little time), but by giving the client exactly what he asked for.
Aaaaaargh!
When the Pedigree guy was asked, point blank, whether he envisioned celebrities in his commercial, he said, "If you want to use celebrities, that's fine, but what we really need are dog stories."
So the women gave him three dog stories. Just like he asked for.
This is a classic scenario illustrating why clients should step back and let creative people do their work. By all means, give input. But don't dictate concept.
Empresario (in their eagerness) slavishly took dictation and overthought it. Hydra took general direction and ran with it.
And the guys won. Again.
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS
* Ivanka Trump walking back to confront Gene Simmons' parting insinuation she was spying for the gals rather than simply doing her job as their task supervisor. You go, girl.
* Nely Galan's face when Nadia Comaneci (in her one real insight) opined the only way Empresario would lose is by not using celebrities in the ad.
* Piers Morgan's jokey correction of Gene Simmons' pronunciation of Sun Tzu's name: "It's just embarassing when he does that little [non-expletive deleted]."
THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: Special Olympics <http://www.specialolympics.org>
THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation <http://www.pedaids.org/>
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Tuesday, January 15th, 2008, 12:44 pm
I'll admit it -- I've never been a big fan of The Apprentice. Early seasons of it appeared while I had little, if any, time for pure entertainment television time, and subsequent seasons were panned so universally that I didn't even bother.But the prospect of a celebrity edition of the show has proved to be appointment television for me, and I'm not even a big fan of reality shows in general.Don't get me wrong -- while this whole D-lister spectacle is predictably funny, the best part (for me, anyway, since I'm known for putting the "anal" in "analytical") has been in discerning the real business lessons (and the fake ones, too -- after all, these ARE celebrities) in each challenge.Week one -- selling hot dogs. Pretty standard Apprentice stuff. So, how did the men's team trounce the women so handily, even with an Apprentice vet leading the losers?Lesson One: It's not what you know, it's who you know ... and are. Oh, Omarosa. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Trying to prove to The Donald that you're the consummate businesswoman -- "solid sales skills," "focus on quality product," blah, blah, blah.Meanwhile, the guys -- starting with Gene Simmons (Exhibit A for the proposition "even the best plastic surgeon can't undo three-plus decades of hell-raising") -- worked the phones selling hot dogs to their rich friends for $5k and up. If the object of the game is simply to make more money than the other team, you use whatever assets you have to get a high-dollar result. And the guys knew their biggest asset was who they were, not what they were selling.As The Donald himself said, "You're big celebrities -- you oughta be able to sell hot dogs at a much higher price." Was Omarosa even listening?Instead, Omarosa got stuck on "process" when she should have focused on "result." I mean, really -- how much value did the frickin' uniforms add to this whole exercise?It's the money, stupid.Lesson Two: Can't pay the price of admission? Tough! I have to admit, I had a difficult time watching Piers Morgan (Exhibit A for the proposition "some men should never observe Casual Friday") bluntly tell people offering $5 for a hot dog to keep on walking.Meanwhile, Nely Galan admitted the women took all comers, whether they offered $5 or $5,000. How nice (and stereotypically female) of them.But the guys knew it was a waste of time and resources to serve small customers who couldn't (or wouldn't) afford what the goods were really worth. Send the cheapskates down a couple of blocks to get a $1 hot dog -- there's someone right behind them willing to drop $100 here and now.So the men managed to do the same volume of business ... while making three times as much money than the women. Smart.Lesson Three: Youth and good looks are no match for age and treachery. Poor Tiffany Fallon, Playmate of the Year, became the first to feel the heat from the blazing pit that is Omarosa's mouth. If Tiffany's status as a Playmate wasn't enough to make her a target (do I smell jealousy, Omarosa, or just halitosis?), Tiff sealed her fate when she got her hackles raised during the planning session. Not good.Nothing short of out-selling Marilu Henner (the day's heroine) would have saved her. Even so, she shrunk from defending herself and handed the Donald a perfect reason to fire her -- no call to the Hef for a donation.But don't worry, Tiff, honey. Yeah, you were the first one fired. And that sucks. But not as bad as that dress Omarosa had on.MY FAVORITE MOMENTS * Gene Simmons: "I'm the salesman, baby."
* Piers Morgan over megaphone to a particularly aggressive negotiator: "You don't really want me to give you change [for a $20] out of my bag, now, do you? Don't be so embarrassing."
* Marilu Henner committing insubordination to bring in 65% of the women's total. Attagirl, red!THE FIRED APPRENTICE'S CHARITY: The Walter Reed Society <http://www.walterreedsociety.org/>THE WINNING PM'S CHARITY: Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund <http://www.findacure.org/>
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