Kendra who?
Until tonight, I’d have bet on Alex, or even Chris.
And I absolutely despise Tana.
But the all-nighter-pull-it-off-all-by-herself rocketed Kendra to the forefront for me.
Back from the land of sky blue water (wa-a-ater) and the time machine is collecting dustbunnies. This week, the Raj Ratings are live before a studio audience and full of chewy, technicolor goodness. What did we learn this week? These people are basically one synapse away from going crazy and starting to rant about the Holy Church of Chester on a downtown street corner. I can’t wait for Trump to proudly proclaim these people as the best of the best. That’s like calling the New York Knicks one of the 30 best basketball teams. Just because they play on a court with a round ball, it doesn’t mean they are even remotely competent.
Nursery School - Full of crying, childish people that could use either a potty break or a nap. These folks deserve to be watched by the crooked daycares profiled on “60 Minutes”.
Todd, Brian, Danny, Kristen, Michael, Tara, Audrey, John, Erin, Stephanie, Angie - This is a good season because of all of these losers, I can think of maybe 1 or 2 that were incorrectly fired. Much improved over last year. This is a bad season, because none of these people are worth the amount of bits currently displaying their names. It’s kind of like finding out you won a raffle and the prize is two kicks to the groin while everyone else has to withstand 3.
Chris (SS) (Elem. School) - What a shocker. You know, I was fully prepared to come in and once again savage Chris. But, based on the emotion and pain he had post-firing you could tell that, as opposed to a lot of the idiots on this show, he really wanted this and wanted to do well at it. He clearly didn’t do great, but I can at least respect someone for wanting to do his best and at least caring enough to try. So, good job in that regard.
Isiah Thomas - Good grief, meeting you was the reward? Honestly, they should have sent the losing team to meet with you because you really might be the worst business mind on the face of the Earth. Granted, my disgust for all things Isiah is well known, but you suck dude. As a coach? Awful. As a league owner? Clearly horrific. As a GM? Maybe the worst of all. The Knicks will suck for years because of his deals. This is like one step from a reward involving meeting Ken Lay.
Elementary School - Some growth, but in the end it’s a place rife with playground fights, name calling, and a trip to the Principal’s office.
Middle School - A group that might be growing up but still prone to wild swings based on playground fights, name calling, and puberty.
Alex (BS) (High School) - Never has a candidate more needed some reality show version of 911. The avalanche has started.
High School - Not quite a child, not quite an adult. Frankly, I still don’t know what to make of these folks.
Bren (BS) (High School) - I think you can stay here for another week. You had good ideas that weren’t implemented and no one corrected your mistakes in writing so I can’t blame you too much on that one. Still, this competition isn’t yours to win.
Craig (SS) (High School) - I won’t fault either you or Tana for going off and sleeping. Some people can go all night and do well. Others need sleep and can then resume their work (I would be one of those people). However, next time try sleeping for a few hours in an adjacent conference room just in case a co-worker needs help. You can rest but still be available and not quite so abandony.
College - Older and wiser, things are looking up. Maybe not ready to enter the real world yet, but getting close.
Kendra (BS) (College) - Yup, she’s winning because Trump’s lesson of the week pretty much shadowed it. You’ll beat Tana in the final 2 because she clearly went against a Trump lesson. That said, you do kind of suck. What have we seen of you over these many weeks? Nothing for about 7 weeks. Then, we learned that once you have a successful idea (meet with surrounding merchants, ask shoppers questions) you will ride it to death. And, you can make pretty brochures. Woohoo, the next Apprentice! If that’s all it takes, a legion of middle management people with marketing degrees will blow Trump’s socks off. But, you really don’t strike me as an enjoyable person. At all.
Tana (SS) (College) - Heh heh, she said sluts. You can’t say she isn’t enjoying this experience and getting everything out of this that can be had.
Grad School - These people have a clue, have some seasoning, and have a chance to make an impact.
None, not even the winner of this gets to go here. There are all just so excitingly average.
PhD - Ready for tweed jackets, big paydays, and a job as Trump’s shot doctor.
The Rancic/Perdew corollary update. Tana and Kendra are the final 2. Craig is done with that “Young lady” comment in the previews. Alex is clearly going the wrong way. Bren’s most memorable moment is veggie porn.
I did, too. As much as he has been a loose cannon, the crying really showed the depth of his frustration and desire to succeed here. I also wondered if he wasn’t just totally knackered at that point, and if the firing was almost a relief. As my husband pointed out, 7 boardrooms in a row can get a little stressful.
Good point. Although, the story of his recent arrest shows that he really hasn’t worked all that hard on them (or at least not yet).
I had a lot of respect for that. It showed me that they truly get that this is business and not personal, while a lot of the time, the females are shrieking at each other at that point.
I thought if Chris survived this weeks firing, they should get a chair engraved with his name on it, he spends so much time there.
YES MR TRUMP, THIS IS THE 7TH TIME IN A ROW I"VE LOST.
He only almost lost it once, when he said IF, IF, IF, IF,… when someone was trying to cut him off. That was pretty classy what Tumrp did after firing him though. But I still don’t see what anyone sees in him.
I’d be bummed if I was Trump, none of these remaining ones deserve the job.
Yeah, I totally dug that. It seems like a lot of time, especially last season, people didn’t get that this is essentially a game, and everyone is in it to win. “Goodness, how dare so-and-so say I should be fired? Should she not acquiesce to the greatness that is I, and obligingly commit seppuku in the Boardroom? The nerve! She said she was my friend.” So it is refreshing to see a couple Apprenti basically admitting that they’re gonna try to tear each other a new one, friendship notwithstanding.
Some credit for the same attitude should go to Chris, too. Despite his overbearing personality, he knew one of the three was gonna go home, and he essentially took it in stride and expressed no hard feelings afterward. As much as I think Chris would make a terrible Apprentice, and as much as I think he would really rub me the wrong way in real life, he does seem to have a firmer grasp on the realities of this game than three quarters of the other Apprenti.
Didn’t Trump say that the candidates would meet some of the greatest Knicks? I was thinking we’d get Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl the Pearl. AT LEAST give me Bernard King!
But those three? No wonder the Knicks stink!
With the exception of Kurt Thomas. He’s an all-time great. Apparently, most teams want to trade Lebron James, Shaq, Kobe, and Tim Duncan for him.
Well, while I was disappointed in Tana last night, I still think she’s miles ahead of Bren and Alex, who seemed to half-enjoy their sinking ship last night.
Next week is the last board room (I’ll predict Craig’s demise right now), so we’ll see how good a “talker” the remaining four are.
I’d have more sympathy for Chris’s crying if he hadn’t been such a bullying prick for so long.
I’m surprised to see so many people impressed by Kendra’s all nighter. Sure, she did a good job on the brochure. She did win the task mostly by herself. However, she was a terrible leader. It was one AM or so, and they still didn’t have an idea for what they were doing. The other two team members were sitting behind her and staring at a computer screen picture.
Shes a good worker, not a good manager.
I don’t know why they were harping on the fact that they used a “blurred” picture of the car in their brochure.
I’ve seen it been used before in brochures like BMW motorcycles. It does convey speed and motion. Maybe the Solstice isn’t that fast?
I liked when Trump asked them what they thought of the car. They seemed to have edited out the lines like “sure it looks nice, till you find out it’s a POS Pontiac”,
“what is this, the poor man’s version of a Miata, S2000, or Z3?”,“nothing says class and success like Pontiac mister Trump”
I thought it was interesting how Craig was criticizing Kendra about not communicating her vision when his team accused him of the same thing when he was project manager. Remember how everyone thought the box was a bad idea and no one understood what Craig was trying to do? But then the box turned out to be a huge hit. It’s the same with Kendra and her brochure.
Kendra excelled at this task, but only because she excels at making brochures. If she was project manager for something she’s not good at (like wearable tech), then she would have completely failed.
I thought it was presumptuous of Tana to jump in and start presenting, but her presentation skills are way better than Kendra’s. Kendra has a lot of affectation in her voice and she bobs her head around a lot which I find very distracting. I don’t know if they discussed who was going to present, but I’m guessing that nothing was said and Kendra just planned on doing it all herself.
Debaser (post #50) and filmore (post#52) absolutely hit the nail on the head with Kendra. Everyone should re-read those posts when Kendra wins. And then send sympathy cards to anyone that will work for her.
How bad are these candidates? Put them in the universe of season 1, which is pretty widely viewed as the best.
Craig - Pretty much Bowie. Nice, pleasant, average, took 13th.
Bren - A little odd, better than average, but prone to big mistakes. A bit like Erika who was out 9th.
Alex - Solid but unspectacular. Looks good based on competition. Most like Kristi who was out 12th.
Tana - Obviously like Troy. No college, in the hick bucket, but nice and pretty darn good. Troy took 5th.
Kendra - Seems solid, good at doing not at leading. Not a great communicater. She has a lot of Nick in her and he took 4th.
None of these could crack the top 4 in that season because I think they all would have paled in comparison. This is a pretty weak group.
Well normally they would use a motion photography thing where they focus on the car as it goes by so the background is blurred and the car is relatively clear so it looks like the car is wizzing along. This was just the whole photo as a blur. Plus the car was at an awkward angle in the frame so it just looked blurry. I burst out laughing when George yelled something like “you just gave us a blurry car!” The way he said blurry just made me laugh.
I was kind of of the opinion that it’s a chick car. It just seemed like it was a “cute” car and that Pontiac would want to appeal to women with it, at least by being inclusive of the female market. That demographic wouldn’t care as much about speed or performance. I thought Kendra had the right idea with photos of the car outside a cute bistro, etc. She really did a good job of appealing to that idea that this car would enhance your lifestyle and you’d mostly enjoy looking at it as opposed to, say, having races in it. That’s why I laughed so hard when Chris had this low-rent looking model sitting on it. Teenage boys would love it but they don’t generally have the money for a car like that. I would have though Alex would have been much savvier at picking up on that. He’s sort of metro and I would think he would also be the target market for a car like that. (I think Alex would be more moved seeing the car parked outside a cute bistro than moving so fast it blurrs off the page.) Didn’t I see him in an adorable yellow v-neck with a matching tie? I don’t know how a guy who could pick out an outfit like that would be so dumb about marketing. He’s really vacant. It’s fitting that he thought “I was taking a nap” would be an appropriate excuse in the boardroom.
I agree 100% that Kendra thinks she won the battle but really, she only demonstrated that she would be a great employee and a shitty manager. On the other hand, if she didn’t feel that primadonna complex, she could learn to lead a team. I really had a hunch that the reason she didn’t plan the project and communicate well was that she craved sole credit. It’s a self defeating strategy that a lot of people fall into when they want to stand out. It’s actually something I did a lot when I was younger. My theory is that her psychology worked against her. She is still at the stage of trying to be confident in her abilities, and so she can’t lead because she wants to sabotage everyone else by leaving them out of her thought process and thereby not letting them contribute ideas or challenge her ideas. As soon as Craig challenged her in the cab on the CD idea she had a choice to sell him on the idea or to sulk and she decided to clam up and sulk. I agree that part of his role is to give her ideas the chance and give her respect, but if she were to win, she can’t rely on her employees to just hand her respect.
One thing is that she was obviously a good manager when it came to the designers. She got them to help her create her vision which isn’t automatically easy. If she had worked with them the way she worked with Craig and Tana, how would the brochure get done in one night at all? So I suspect it was that she was intimidated by Craig and Tana and threatened, and in order to avoid dealing with that challenge she invented this self-created drama of them not hearing her. That was my assessment.
There were a lot of funny moments last night. I laughed hard when Alex said that the reason people would want to open their brochure was because there was some red on the cover! “Ooh look! Red! I want to read that!” Then later Chris said that they didn’t want to put anything too exciting on the cover because they wanted to save it for inside. Like maybe he would also like to hide the whole thing under a rock out back and wait for the potential customer to discover it by accident to add to the impact!
True, she didn’t manage well. However, I also place the blame squarely on her followers. That is the type of situation where both leaders and followers need to work together to come up with a solution that takes advantage of their relative strengths. Good leaders don’t just give up on their followers, and good followers don’t simply bail when the going gets tough.
Quoting myself, I now have the answer to that question. After seeing Chris on the Today Show this morning, the answer to whether Chris is starting work on his character defects is a resounding “Hell no!” Not just because he got arrested, but because he kept spinning that it was all based on an “unrealistic expectation” on his part and that “I don’t have an anger management problem, I’m just a passionate person” till I totally tuned him out.
What a little jerkweed. Even seeing himself on national TV he doesn’t realize that the entire US thinks he’s a volcano waiting to blow and probably wants to have nothing to do with him now.
I loved Bren’s 2:30 prediction.
Geez, what if Tana and Craig had gone to sleep, woke up, and Kendra was still thinking about the brochure? She assured them she would handle it, but what if she didn’t, or if she totally screwed it up? How would that Board Room have gone?
I was disappointed that Craig and Tana poo-pooed Kendra’s suggestion for a CD in the brochure – that would have been great. But she sorta did it anyway, by making that round brochure that could easily include a CD. Good for her.
Alex should have been fired for neglecting to get photos of the nameplate and the car’s interior. The nameplate would have made a more interesting cover for their brochure – which looked an owner’s manual. How dull was that?
Chuckled at Chris mispronouncing the name of the car. Solster? Combination of Solstice and Roadster? 
Exactly right! That’s why I think they share in the blame, and ultimately contributed little to their team’s success.
I acknowledge that Kendra wasn’t an outstanding leader. However, sometimes a leader is indeed limited by the quality of her people.
It wasn’t so much that they bailed on Kendra, but their attitudes. It is clear Craig does not like Kendra and tunes her out. He was the one that kept saying there wasno vision, whatever. I don’t recall that being Tana’s complaint. Tana lost points when she said, “I’m the project manager, I’m safe, eff you, I’m going to bed.”
I think this highlights the weakness of the show in terms of it trying to find good candidates. because really certain personel options are missing, you cannot fire someone, you cannot go to a superior, you cannot find someone else to do the job. That is because the project is secondary, the tasks are tests and means to an end. In the “real business worl” the tasks are the ends. So if the task has the wrong people, you get the right people. Kendra can’t make her teammates do anything, the only leverage she has is the boardroom and that is out of her control. She worked well with the team that put together the brochure, but not with her teammates. I think that is actually more a reflection on the nature of the show than anything else.