Category Archives: talent management

The most startling moment of this episode – officially called, with blinding insight, Flat-Pack – happened a few minutes in, and I’ve been trying to have my retinas repaired ever since. Earlier in the series than usual, The Apprentice played the ‘everyone was relaxing at home on a day off, with a camera crew – as you do’ trope, and the remaining 14 contenders (I use the word loosely) suddenly found themselves with thirty minutes to reapply the bling. Girls scampered along luxury corridors, hectically searching for trowels so they could re-do their eye make-up. Meanwhile, not content with flashing his abs at us in a towel last week, Myles decided that the most appropriate way to behave on camera in a men’s dorm is to wiggle across our eye line in a thong. In a programme with no audience voting, I was left wondering which bottom line he was most eager to demonstrate familiarity with. His own, possibly? Fundamental mistake there, Myles. Oh well, maybe he was just showing us his best side …

Thereafter, the jokes continued to phone themselves through. These week’s challenge – delivered, please note, without any fanfare about its central importance to the economy or any other brouhaha – is to design, prototype and pitch an item of flatpack furniture, with a maximum RRP of £75. Before the phrase has left voice-over man’s lips, I am already thinking ‘yep, strictly two dimensional’ and ‘a child of five could do it’ (and the related jokes). But can 14 children aged between 22 and 39 do it? By the time you are reading this, all bets are off. Do not call now: you may still be charged and your opinion will be disregarded. (For those struggling with maths, the RRP limit is slightly more than half of the TV licence fee you have already paid to be seeing this.)

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The one with the brewery. There’s no need for a spoiler, is there? Lord Sugar even utters the immortal line, although you’re made to wait about 47 minutes for it. It doesn’t constitute either suspense or surprise. And given that most of us recognise the human ability to make a fool of ourselves over alcohol (this is a blog, not a confessional, let’s keep things general …), mixing fifteen idiots and a brewery was always going to be a little predictable. Oh well, down the hatch …

It’s 6am in the Apprentimansion. Jason is wearing the kind of stripey jimjams that would make most viewers over a certain age (or of a certain disposition) think of Rock Hudson. Luisa’s Doris Day impersonation, meanwhile, is way off the mark. It’s the series’ habitual soft-porn/candidates-in-their-undergarments section, and the lads have got their tats out for the lasses. Myles impersonates an old Badedas bath foam advert for the cameraman’s benefit, but I’d have thought the chances of a seasoned film crew succumbing to his over-advertised charm at 6.02am were a little thin. Neil, episode 1’s gruellingly relentless back-seat driver, meanwhile reveals a physical quirk. Despite having one of those beards that disappears down his neck, his chest is as bald as his ambition. For at least one good reason, someone needs to deal with that man with a cut-throat razor.

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In the “You’ve Been Fired” follow-on programme for Episode 2, Dara O’Briain demonstrated how a change of background music can alter our perception of a piece of footage. The winning team strolling around a Belgian square could be either edgy or comic, depending on the accompanying score. (Left as just a dialogue track, of course, it remained tragic, but music’s awesome power can’t change everything.)

Throughout Episodes 1 & 2 of Series 9 – and two episodes on consecutive nights really was in danger of being too much of a good thing – I often had an imaginary alternative soundtrack. “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.” And if Mrs Ampaw-Farr was watching, you might want to pay more attention to Noel Coward than Lord Sugar next time opportunity knocks. Yes, here we are again with The Apprentice. 16 fresh hopefuls, spouting like a school of whales and as estranged from modesty as they are from understatement.

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At our recent Ideas Exchange event at The Gallery Soho, we invited those attending to write their questions on a giant blackboard as triggers for discussion. We’ve taken a few moments since then to offer suggested brief answers to three of these questions, and you’ll find our ‘starters for ten’ below – but we’d very much welcome the contributions, thoughts and suggestions of others: simply use the Leave a Reply box at the bottom of this posting to share your thoughts with us.

We’ll be posting ‘answers’ to other questions raised on the day shortly – follow us on Twitter for announcements, or subscribe to our blog to be notified of new posts by email. (And if you’d like to be notified of future events, please contact us.)

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Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do. The visible signs of artful leadership are expressed, ultimately, in its practice.
Max Depree

In the heart of London’s West End, right on Charing Cross Road, The Gallery Soho was the ideal venue for ASK’s second Ideas Exchange event (see details of last year’s event here): where better to invite people to discuss the fine arts of leadership and organisational change.

As before, we set out some broad themes for exploration – organisational development, executive coaching, leadership development and talent management – but we also made sure that the event was as much about the participants as it was about the hosts.
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It’s one of the classic HR/interview questions, isn’t it? Where you see yourself in some hypothetical future state, having mysteriously gained awesome prophetic powers that enable you to accurately foresee not just your own career trajectory, but the future health of the interviewing company, the economy in general, your personal life circumstances – and presumably that bus you step out of the way of just in time sometime in 2017. The biggest mystery is not that interviewers assume we have gained these powers simply by combing our hair and ironing our best formal wear, but that we show the humility and social grace to attempt an answer.

It’s a point well made by Neil Morrison at his Change-Effect blog, in the context of affording the candidate a sense of their on-going humanity and hopefully not too severely damaged dignity. From my own experience, it’s a point that many an interviewer – despite their years of experience – could do with taking on board. I can still recall a job interview with a highly respected University where I arrived in the state of combined optimism and agitation that tells you that this is a position that you feel genuinely excited about. By the five-minute mark, the questions and the atmosphere they were creating had firmly persuaded me otherwise. By the ten-minute mark, I was deliberately giving answers that I hoped would be judged as disastrously as possible. (Three days later, I had to find a way to politely turn down their written offer. I can only assume that the other candidates fared even worse against their inexplicable criteria.)

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A week ago, there was an auspicious alignment of two of the most influential black Americans: Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second time (if electing a black President was historic, how should we describe his re-election?) on Martin Luther King Day, a public holiday in the USA.

These two men have done more, at least in the public eye, to drive forward the equality agenda in the US then any others. Of course, they have had allies and collaborators, antecedents and ancestors, but in terms of leaving a footprint on the society in which they lived and served they have no equals.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

While I could spend time analysing and commenting on the political nature of their struggles I am struck by something more universal that connects both men – an underlying belief in the potential of all: a shared belief that we should all be judged not by who we are but by what we do. And the belief that equality is, fundamentally, a statement of the potential of all of us to succeed in whatever field of endeavour we chose and that we should be free to pursue this success without hindrance from others based on bias or stereotype.

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The lyrics, as I suspect you’re aware, are from a Radiohead song. If you know it, you’ll know how it continues.

Comfortable, not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym 3 days a week
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”

You’ll probably also be aware that it is far from a comforting listen, intoned as it is by a computerised voice (although not, as some have assumed, by Stephen Hawking). Compiled as a litany of phrases that author Thom Yorke saw as epitomising the time – the 1990s – he has also described the recording as being conducted in a feeling of hysterical anxiety. One commentator described it as “penetrating surgery on pseudo-meaningful corporations lifestyles”, but I can’t help but wonder if one of the words in a quote by Yorke about the song is more telling.

When Yorke commented that “I see it as the ultimate dissociation with the lyrics and your responsibilty for it. See it as something between a statement and an experiment”, it was the word responsibility that leapt out at me. Essentially a song about wellbeing in its broadest sense, its unsettling chill comes from its cataloguing of the bland ways in which the notion was not so much promoted as sold to us. To me, part of the lyrical cold front comes from the way that the lyric posits wellbeing not just as something that is a personal responsibility but also as something that a failure to achieve is entirely a personal fault:

Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)”

It was a song that I immediately thought of when a colleague sent me a copy of a Gallup Business Journal article about a recent Gallup poll that showed not just that wellbeing levels among work team members are strongly inter-connected, but that the wellbeing of supervisors impacts increasingly on their reports over time. Misery, it seems, might like company, but company might do better without its unsolicited affections.

I’m not entirely sure why this should come as a surprise: how did the fact that dissatisfied, unengaged, disgruntled people might make the most inspiring backdrop to your day become something labelled as news? And we might ask the same question about the impact of working for a cheerless, anti-social or ill-tempered manager. Perhaps our instant associations for the word ‘wellbeing’ are partly to blame? When the government announced it was going to survey national happiness back in 2010, I was both suspicious and cynical. My first thought was the remade version of The Rise and Fall of Reggie Perrin:

… the critics may have bestowed only mixed blessings, but I’ve loved the updating of hopeless, incompetent Doc Morrissey in the original series to ‘The Wellness Person’ – a character so wet that even the most absorbent kitchen towel would surely struggle.”

Jollier than Radiohead it may have been, but wellbeing was still the stuff of platitudes delivered by someone remote from the reality of those in dire need of it. We weren’t entirely in the realm of scented candles and essential oils – in relation to which I always have to remind myself that the adjective ‘essential’ has two meanings. But we were in a fantasy kingdom where strangers dispense a flimsy leaflet with the satisfied flourish of a fairy waiving a wand: laughing at the wand and the tutu might, under the circumstances, be the greater part of any therapeutic effect.

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Before we’ve even kicked off (that being a carefully selected verb), it’s clear that rank is being pulled. Today’s briefing venue will be a football ground, but not Karren’s West Ham United. The final four are off to White Hart Lane, where Lord S is former chairman of the mighty Spurs . En route, the pieces to camera are confirming suspicions as much as they are outlining hopes and aspirations. Lucy sees Ashleigh as her biggest competition, but tells us it’s not about who shouts loudest. Patrick wants to be one of the best fashion designers in the country. Ashleigh assures us she has the best reputation of all the candidates, having only been in the last three once – and that that had been down to the PM rather than to her. Maria goes for the modest approach: “I hate to break it to you but I think I might win”, she demurs, before telling us that she is after the backing and the insights rather than the money. (Maybe when she’s older she’ll realise that money can by you other people’s insights too.)

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Summonsed to a luxurious hair salon that was originally London’s barber’s salon, each candidate prepares in their own way: Lucy applies hair spray with the vigour of a woman with a grudge against the ozone layer, while Maria informs us that it’s very important to look good in business. Perhaps she’s in early preparation for her close-up, as this week the teams will develop a tv ad for a styling product (a £200m market, and that’s just Lucy), and then pitch their brand and their campaign to marketing professionals. (But not, it seems, styling product professionals.)

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