There's no 'I' in 'Team'

This week's Celebrity Apprentice showed an example of how a selfish player can cause much conflict within a team. The men vs. women format was broken up and Arsenio was stuck with Aubrey and Teresa. Aubrey had previous experiences with the women's team that showed her selfishness but it became quite apparent in this episode.

Arsenio was right about the way she handled the box. Watch this brief video below to see how he catches the box, then immediately places it on the table in front of the rest of the team. Aubrey picks it up, looks it over and tosses it aside. The two men to her right, who had been eager to look at the box themselves and sat back while she examined it, looked shocked when she tossed it aside, not giving them a view.

Pretty soon, Arsenio called her out for not being a team player and the rest of the team backed him up. Watch her dig herself further into a hole.

Finally, she reveals how little of a team player she is when, after her team wins the challenge, she stalks off by herself rather than trying to console herself amongst the rest of her winning team.



Her last words were telling: "I just don't know if this is the right place for me." Yes! A team is NOT the right place for you. You need to be on your own. 

Oh, and I found the 'I' in team here.

John beats Marlee in Celebrity Apprentice

It was a great season of Celebrity Apprentice, with excellent workers mixed in with crazy people. I think Trump left bitches like Star Jones and NeNe and crazies like Garey Busey and LaToya in the show too long simply to help ratings and give us all someone to root against. But when it came to the finale, he chose the best of each team, Marlee Matlin and John Rich.

Marlee was the only level head on her team. Dionne Warwick was off in the spirit world, Hope, Niki and Latoya were complete airheads, NeNe was too busy yelling at everyone else, while Star Jones was backstabbing them and Lisa Rinna wimped out in the boardroom.
On the men's side David Cassidy and Jose Canseco were the wimps, Garey Busey, the nut, while the rest were pretty level headed. This gave them a huge advantage in the challenges with Lil John, Mark McGrath, Meatloaf and Richard Hatch providing a stable core for a series of wins. The other four had to leave the team because they were the leader when the men's team lost and took the hit or they were not strong enough in the boardroom.

As far as challenges went, the men did great, losing only when the women raised more money while screwing up the actual project. The pizza challenge was a complete mess, the women had huge lines at the door, they failed to deliver their pies and they even closed the store to paying customers because they couldn't serve them. But they won the challenge because they raised more money due to some big wallets on the phone. Same problem on the art sale, look at the women's team's lack of organization in getting their event off the ground:

But once again, due to big donor friends of Marlee, the women's team won again.

The final challenge was comprised of three parts: Design a new label for 7-Up, produce a video and host an event. Both did a good job on the redesigned label although I thought Rich's team could have used more green in the label. The commercials both had their moments, with Twisted Sister in Rich's and Geoffrey Holder in Marlee's. Both hit the decade they were to represent and were great choices.

The difference came at the event. Marlee's was flawless: Check it out:

John Rich's event had problems. People were greeted at the door with cheesy stuff and they forgot to even welcome in the VIPs, including Mr. Ego, Trump, himself! But that was nothing compared to the major SNAFU delivered by John Rich himself, introducing the whole crowd to Def Leppard when they were 20 minutes away from being ready. He left the crowd hanging for a long time before he thought to perform himself.

But it didn't matter in the end. As Mark McGrath pointed out, John Rich won for his body of work even if Marlee won this event.

And the winner is...

There were some good tear-jerking moments at the end that reminded me that the whole thing was about charity in the long run. Too bad Trump can't remember that the show isn't all about him.

Check out Marlee's trip to Africa to visit her charity in action:

And the song Marlee and John sing at the end. Do wait for the applause.

Poor negotiation on Celebrity Apprentice

Last night I finally picked up one of the Celebrity Apprentice episodes I had missed: the one where Niki Taylor was fired. In the previous episodes she had stood out on the women's team as a great team player who rose above the back-stabbing and cliques that had doomed every challenge undertaken by them.

Watching the episode I saw how she lost. My first surprise was the naivete she showed when negotiating for the camper set. She recognized immediately that the men's team would choose the $200,000 bus while she wanted the other set. But rather than using this knowledge to her benefit, she simply told the men, 'No problem, I wanted the other camper.' Why didn't she use this knowledge to actually negotiate, as asked, and get some money from the men? She could have used this to buy more equipment or decorations for her set.

She was not a tough leader and allowed her team to shirk an important task: buying greenery for her set, which really hurt the impression her team made on the judges. The one time she got tough was when Dionne was looking for LaToya and this was one case when Dionne was in the right.

She also seemed to be confused about which century she was in, constantly referring to this as the Twentieth century. Seeing her chatting with Hope was like listening to air hissing rapidly out of a pair of heads.

I will say this for her, and Trump was also impressed: she took the fall gracefully and refused to throw any of her team-mates under the bus for her team's failure.

Watch the full episode here if you wish. Full episode: unhappy-campers

Wasting Team Member's Time on Celebrity Apprentice

One of my cardinal rules of Project Management is "Never Waste Team Members' Time!" I constantly preach that a good Project Manager should monitor meetings and, if they see team members are not needed for the rest of the meeting, send them out to be productive.

In last week's Celebrity Apprentice Nene, the Project Manager, was faced with an interesting situation. The team had worked together to create and film a video and the last task was the editing of this video. This task required two people but she chose to involve her entire team. Most of the team was excited by seeing the project through to the end and wanted to be there with her. But Dionne Warwick, the oldest member of the team, wanted to go home and get some sleep.

At this point several mistakes were made in a row.

1. Nene should have offered to let team members off the hook. Instead she asked that all attend.
2. Dionne should have been clear about her needs and ask to go home. Instead she just hinted.
3. Dionne, after seeing she was not needed, should have asked to be excused. Instead she simply declared she was going home.

When it came time for the board-room and someone to be fired, Dionne became an obvious choice. But rather than call Nene on the carpet for neglecting her team members, Dionne lied about asking to go home and was roundly criticized. Then she made the fatal mistake of daring Donald to fire her. Big mistake.

Thrown under the bus on Celebrity Apprentice

What do you do when finding yourself in this situation? You are coerced into being the Project Manager of a group where there are two factions. One wants to work with you to bring about success. The other group wants to cause you to look bad, even if the project fails due to their efforts. They will be closer to their goals because they believe you will be forced to leave the company when the project fails.

Actually, it sounds quite similar to a situation I faced at my one of my jobs in New Jersey. The previous PM had left the company in disgust at the QA/RA clique whose only contributions to the project appeared to be clamping the brakes on any effort R&D made to develop a new product, refusing to offer constructive solutions around the obstacles they placed in the engineer’s path, and then complaining to management that R&D never came up with any new products.

What I did was spend three weeks fighting my way through the ‘Storming’ phase of team development until we all agreed on a Project Objective that we used to complete the project. I had the benefit of time, a luxury Lisa Rinna lacked in this week’s Celebrity Apprentice.

While the men’s team ran smoothly except for a delivery snafu that seemed to be edited to add drama, the women’s team was another leaderless mess. They fought for the book’s concept, the characters, the basic theme. They violated the originality clause they had been given as a key criteria. Lisa allowed the arguing to escalate, not taking charge until being told to multiple times by her team-mates.

Meanwhile, Star Jones had gathered her cronies and set the stage for the demise of her rival. With NeNe and Dionne on her side, she proceeded to sabotage the project and do everything in her power to make Lisa look bad. She wrote the children’s book but refused to approve it during a tense scene designed to put pressure on Lisa and force her to take the fall if it failed. Then she turned around after the approval to ask that her name appear on the cover as author and Dionne’s as conceiver. The ego of these women! Fortunately Lisa vetoed this and left the team name as author.

Star belittled Lisa during her pep talk before the performance, showing clearly that lines had been drawn. But it wasn’t until the boardroom that the claws came out in force. Lisa was clearly intimidated by the ferocity of the attacks she sustained there and said it all when she admitted that she wasn’t used to fighting this meanly.

She had plenty of ammunition she could have used to defend herself against the condemnation of Star and her cronies. The project failed for three reasons:

1. The story was unoriginal
2. The concept was too advanced for the five year-old audience
3. The font size was too small

All three of these faults could have been laid directly at the feet of the two women who wanted their names on the book. Add that to the fact that their egos had driven them to want to rise above their team and Lisa could have buried either of them. But she didn’t bring it up herself and spent the whole time trying to defend against the attacks. The one time she tried to elicit support from the rest of the team, it only emphasized her weakness. She turned to her team and asked, “Did I run around like a chicken with its head cut off...completely?” Even Don junior picked up on this and criticized her roundly.

There were a couple of funny scenes in the full board-room. In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, (can we use that expression on Apprentice, Omarosa?) Trump critiqued Lisa’s lips. And then when Marlee Matlin referred to Dionne Warwick as ‘people tell me she's a legend’, Trump forgot she was deaf and was incredulous that Marlee didn’t think Warwick was indeed a legend. Duh!

Instead of Lisa bringing back with her the two players most responsible for the project’s failure, she brought Star and Dionne back simply because they were being mean to her earlier. And they crucified her. Statements Lisa made like, “This is a learning experience for me,” were pounced on by Star as evidence of her weakness.

As much as I prefer her personality to Star’s, the decision Trump made was correct. Lisa was a weak leader and everyone, including Lisa, knew it. She had to be fired.

Here’s a link to the full episode.

Celebrity Apprentice 2011 Show #2

Celebrity Apprentice Project Management

The Celebrity Apprentice has all the project management elements of the original Apprentice show: teams must initiate, plan, execute, control and close out a project during a two hour show, but with one added wild card. The celebrities can call in favors from their rich friends and fans on the outside to add money to any project and make it 'win'. And that is usually the definition of winning, raising more money for charity than the competing team.

Let's examine last night's show. The challenge was to run a pizzeria for four hours. That meant learning how to run the various stations from preparing the dough, to making and cutting up the pizza, to selling and marketing the pizza. The project manager's job was to organize this chaos to make it a success. In addition to all their tasks, the team members needed to raise money from their rich friends. The project manager needed to give the team members time to do this, and had to encourage this fund-raising behaviour but couldn't do the actual fund-raising for them.  Early in the planning session we saw Hatch urging his team to get on the phones and solicit the donations rather than think about the pizzas yet.

The women's team was a disaster in getting the pizzeria running efficiently. Star, the women's PM, delegated some of the women to the hard work of preparing the ingredients while she created a useless piece of graphic art. Then she placed Dionne Warwick on the credit card machine where she seemed to spend her entire time slowly dialing up the Psychic Hotline.

Richard Hatch, the men's PM, delegated everyone to working and made sure everything was in place, though he alienated his team by doing none of the hard work himself. He also 'pushed' David Cassidy out of the way to stop him from distracting the entire team.

You can see the awful 'physical abuse' of poor David Cassidy at about minute 21 on this clip:

Celebrity Apprentice Season Premiere

Once the task got going, the men were running like a well-oiled machine. Gary Busey was out with Lil Jon and John Rich drumming up sales and donations. Jose Canseco was making the pies with minimal help from David Cassidy, who needed multiple smoke breaks. The rest of the team was cutting up and selling the pies and making big deals about donations in order drum up bigger ones. Hatch made the decision to limit the delivery area in order to bring in the most money in the four hours.

The women's team, with Dionne Warwick holding up the cash register was a disaster. At least Niki Taylor could make pies without raising a sweat. The delivery team was a wreck, not taking into account Manhattan traffic. (Did they know about the subway sytem that ran under the streets?) The $35,000 pies that were supposed to be delivered to Chelsea didn't even make it there. And Star closed the shop to street traffic to concentrate on the deliveries! At least Dionne caught up on the register once they stopped accepting new customers.

But who won? Thanks to a lot of huge donations by rich people, the women raised $115k compared to the men's $54k. Then someone had to be fired. Amazingly, almost the entire men's team wanted Hatch to be fired. And Hatch defended himself not by focusing on how well he managed the project but by undermining Cassidy. I think he could have easily shown that the project was successful in every way except for the collection of additional donations which was not under his control.

Watch the clip starting at about minute 60 to see how he cleverly undermines Cassidy's manliness during the boardroom session with his use of repetition in words like 'little', 'delicate', 'underdog', 'star'. It's very clever and it worked with Ivanka and both Donalds. Bringing Canseco in with him and deliberately sitting Cassidy between the two emphasized that the latter really is a little man. Cassidy didn't do himself any favors by looking to Canseco to protect him against Hatch's bullying and ended up being fired for looking weak.

Bottom line. I wish the tasks depended more on project management and less on calling in favors from your rich friends. I'll continue to judge the projects by my own criteria and I say the men won this task by a count of two to one.