Junior Apprentice: Adam & The Cats

I have yet again just managed to un-glue myself from the latest episode of “Junior Apprentice”, and what an episode it was!!!
Leaving last week’s cheese-selling task behind them, and again splitting into two teams, girls v. Boys, Lord Sugar now set them the next mountain to climb: come up with, design and successfully pitch a piece of original camping equipment to three different retailers, and the team with the most orders at the end of the day wins. Simple. Well, not quite...

To start with Lord Sugar threw an immediate cat amongst the pigeons, for no sooner had the girls and boys split into two teams and chosen their leaders in Hannah and, Adam respectively did Lord S promptly switch each team’s project manager. Thus, the girls Emma, Zoe, Hibah and Kirsty were led by the cheerful Cockney Adam, whilst the boys Arjun, Rhys and Tim were led by the not-thus-far-seen-much-of Hannah.
I was apprehensive at first of Hannah as a team leader, and thought she would fall at the first hurdle, but she proved quite adept – she took control, managed her team well and acted decisively, even if it was the over-enthusiastic-having-survived-last-week’s-firing-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth Tim who came up with the majority of the ideas. After a lot of suggesting, they settled on sledge-trolley hybrid, a piece of camping equipment designed to ease the hauling of your other camping equipment from car to tent, particularly useful, as Tim was keen to point out, at muddy-terrain festivals such as Glastonbury.

The biggest shock of the evening was in Adam, who I from last week I had sketched out in my mind as a strong and focussed if cheerful leader, but (perhaps understandably), when confronted with leading a team-full of the most carnivorous girls in young enterprise seemed to shrink away from being a strong and confident cheeky chappy to a flustering, stuttering headless chicken.

It was obvious from the start he was fresh meat for these girls, and they didn’t waste any time in sinking their teeth in. Whilst he enthusiastically waved his arms about trying to generate ideas, he was met with steady and cool female eyes who were casually making up their mind just how to tear him to pieces. Poor Adam was left trying to generate enthusiasm while they started by flippantly throwing criticism his way, accusing him of relying too heavily on them and blatantly openly showing their disrespect for him even through their body language of scowls and sneers (although later on, this turned out not to be true of Emma, who emerged as Adam’s ally). No sooner had Adam split Hebah and Zoe off to conduct market research than it emerged that these two girls were the most flesh-hungry, and, instead of supporting their project manager, began sniping away in the back of their chauffeured car. It was ironic that these two girls of all people should have allied themselves as bitching buddies, because only last week Zoe had caused Hebah, then project manager, to sob in the marketplace by overruling her whilst doing a sale. At the actual focus group itself the girls wasted no time in pushing Hebah’s idea of a collapsible family board game onto the “researchees”, and having rigged themselves a convenient unanimous opinion in favour of it, phoned their team leader for “feedback”. The girls turned their wrath onto their team leader, with Zoe declaring condescendingly that “we have had 100% feedback on this idea, and if anything goes wrong it will be your head on the block”. “And”, added Hebah supportively, “you need to make a decision about this, Adam. You’re the team leader!”.

With such playground bullying going on, I felt sorry for poor Adam who only went redder and redder and got more and more flustered. “Erm ... I don’t know if it’s original!!” he stammered. Clearly, this was an example of a genuinely decent guy trying hard not to be completely steamrolled by two girls who were not treating him with the respect that he deserved as their team leader. It was eventually left to Emma to take charge of a phone call to make the final decision of the product and swiftly tell the two cats that there was no time for this sort of thing. Good on her!
In order to try and appease everyone and to not rock the – already rolling – team boat, Adam eventually also chose a hybrid, although of a slightly rarer breed: a reinforced-cardboard-storage-device-with-built-in-tabletop-board-game facility. You couldn’t fault his enthusiasm – he genuinely believed this product would work and was positive to the bitter end - but Hebah and Zoe proved right on this one - in that it was an utter shambles. Even though Adam wisely delegated the pitch to the silver-and-acid-tongued Zoe, who did a marvellous job of promoting a pile of cardboard to some of the biggest retailers in the land, the seasoned commercial buyers were having none of it and in the boardroom it was revealed that not one of them bought a single one. In contrast, Hannah’s team successfully managed to flog over 3,000 of their sledge-trolleys, leaving her team with grins as wide as a Cheshire cat’s.

Then the knives really came out as each member of Adam’s team fought for survival from the firing finger of Lord Sugar. Inevitably, these metaphorical knives were pointed at Adam. “You were weak at the beginning of the task and I expressed that to you, and you didn’t delegate properly on the first day” declared Zoe, nicely covering her own back whilst thrusting her proverbial knife into Adam’s. “And he wasn’t as quick on the decisions as he should have been” added Hebah quickly. “I think he was trying to focus on being a team and looked for reassurance a lot”, chipped in Kirsty, as poor Adam found himself floundering again, trying desperately to defend himself as his team turned even more against him, except for Emma, who blamed the product rather than Adam, which made her a another sitting duck for the other three to heap their blame on. Amidst torrents of “it was such a poor product that Emma came up with, Lord Sugar” and “Adam wasn’t a good team leader, Lord Sugar”, Adam desperately tried to fight his corner. Sly Zoe, however, at the very last moment before Adam was due to announce which two he was bringing back into the board room, suddenly changed tone and was lyrical with praise for her project manager in order to try and save her own skin.“I think it’s so easy to blame the project manager straight away” she gushed, “I don’t think he was that bad, he was very passionate about the product”.

This wasn’t enough, and quite rightly so, for Adam did indeed bring the two felines Zoe and Hebah back with him and into the firing line, at which point it began to look like curtains for him. Flanked by the self-assured girls smirking to themselves, he plunged into overdrive about how passionate he was about business – “I’ve even got the blisters to prove it!” he said, hands spread upwards. It looked as though he was crashing and burning, and it would be only moments before he would be heading for the car home, until Hebah signed her own Apprentice death warrant - “I don’t own a business or make profit, I’m not into all that” she professed, whereupon she might as well have said “I don’t want to work with you, Lord Sugar, because I really can’t be bothered”. She was promptly, albeit regrettably, fired.
Back on their drive home, Zoe couldn’t resist another dig at Adam. “I think Lord Sugar empathises with you and sees himself in you” she said, as she held her nose in the air. This is probably true, but she was likely sour at the fact Lord S doesn’t see himself in her!

To be fair to Zoe and Hebah, they were right about the product, and the games table Hebah had come up with would have trumped up with more sales (“as 0-0-0 isn’t hard to beat”, said Lord Sugar). But the girls had such contempt for Adam from the start that I doubt even the most talented project manager would have been able to control them. I am glad Adam stayed. In this task he lost his head as team leader, but he is so likeable and has such a successful business elsewhere that can’t be him all of the time. Besides, a workman is only as good as his tools, as the saying goes, and Adam definitely had a few malignant spanners in the works.