I must say that I am a big fan of "The Celebrity Apprentice" but I think the concept is slightly flawed. Every week, it is the person that made a (or more than one) mistake that cost the team the weekly challenge who is fired. It always makes me think of a story that I heard twenty years ago about the CEO of IBM. The story talks about an executive in IBM that just made a mistake that cost the company a million dollars. The executive is summoned into the CEO's office expecting to be fired and says something like, "I fully understand why you're going to fire me". The CEO replies, "Fire you? Why would I fire you? I just spent a million dollars educating you!". When you fire the person that makes a mistake, you are also firing the person that had an idea (maybe the only idea for the team). What is happening in "The Celebrity Apprentice" is that the weaker players are getting by every week because they are not depended on for ideas and are therefore, not directly responsible for the loss. A person cannot make a mistake if (s)he doesn't do anything! I think, instead of asking "who was responsible for this?" (regarding a project task that might have cost the team a win), I think it should be more objective. Quantifying everything a person does for the team (positive and negative) would be less emotional and less subjective. Whoever has a lower score based on positive versus negative contributions would be the one to go. I think the tasks should be weighted so that something like a spelling error on a printed brochure would be worth more (negatively) than a trivial error. As an aside, is it me, or do very few people know how to brainstorm? The purpose of brainstorming is to come up with thousands of ideas (mostly bad) and filter out the bad ones. Often in "The Celebrity Apprentice", someone will come up with a bad idea during brainstorming and will be criticized for it. That is exactly what brainstorming should be - to come up with hundreds of bad ideas before coming up with one good idea. I know from experience, that great ideas can be inspired from not-so-great ideas. Anyway, it's a great show but I think the process of firing someone should be improved. Let's brainstorm some ideas to improve it!Submitted 4/2/2012 12:40:21 PMComment (1)
