Self Reflection on Business English This semester I took classes from my dear teacher Linda Wu, and enjoyed good times watching the exciting and entertaining reality show The Apprentice. As we all known, The Apprentice is an American reality show hosted by real estate magnate, businessman and television personality Donald Trump. The show often starts with 16 to 18 business people competing in an elimination competition. The final prize is a one-year, $250,000 starting contract to run one of Trump's companies. As a symbol of the show, each episode typically ends with Trump eliminating one of the contestants with the words, "You're fired". Different from the Celebrity Apprentice, The Apprentice 10 shows how the ordinary business men or women, who have been influenced by economic crisis, competed with each other in every challenging project. The biggest change is to the rewards—unlike the often lavish rewards that had been granted in prior seasons to the winning teams, in this season, the winning Project Managers are rewarded with one-on-one meetings with some of America's best-known business leaders and CEOs. However since the season received the lowest audience figures of any Apprentice season, Mr. Trump confirmed that this format would be permanently discontinued after this season, and that all future seasons of the show would be in the Celebrity Apprentice format. In my opinion, this season’s conflicts between all the participants were much fiercer than the past seasons. Previous seasons when the competitors competing with each other they could still sometimes catch the feeling of a “team”, however at season 10 the show was filled with friction, lies, and accusing, even the most absorbing creative ideas were buried by dirty tricks and cruel reality. As a result we feel less interested in enjoying the show. On the other hand, it showed that the cruel economic crisis has badly affected how people struggling for their lives by these dirty tricks which would make the audience uncomfortable. As usual, the participants in season 10 were still divided into 2 groups, working separately as men’s team and women’s team. Men called themselves “Octane”, which is colloquially used as a short form of “octane rating”, the ability of reducing the engine knock, to show their anti-pressure ability. Women called themselves “Fortitude”, which refers to persons being brave calm and uncomplaining when they have experience something unpleasant or painful. In episode 3, the two teams were asked to organize and manage a doggy day care, create an attractive and satisfying way to serve the customers. James was the leader and finally Fortitude win the game because of their excellently more creative, more effective and smoother demonstration hosted by group leader Tyana, who has worked as a sales representative. On the other hand, since the owner hated the job that the men's team did and felt that James showed him a lack of respect by repeatedly ignoring his requests, James were finally fired as a frustrated leader. In addition, the conflicts in each team were aggravated in this project. In the team Octane, James prevented David from asking questions in the meeting with the owner because of his rebellion and recklessness, which infuriated David and made him more aggressive. In the team Fortitude, although they were the winner, Liza throw Poppy under the bus in the boardroom, which made her a target of the team and got attacked; Tyana’s refusing Mahsa to work the reception also angered Mahsa which put herself into the dilemma in the coming episode 4. In this episode the two teams were asked to develop a guerrilla marketing stunt—a viral video for Popcorn Indiana. This time the leaders of the two teams were Clint and Mahsa, and Octane win the project for their popcorn-fighting video was more entertaining and absorbing, which fit the require of the guerrilla marketing and a viral video. On the contrary, Fortitude, the women’s team, had have a better idea – eating popcorn in the gym, but the executives feel that it seemed more like a commercial and didn’t focus on the right demographic. The conflicts between the teammates also turn white-hot. At Octane, David had to withdraw from the task at the start of the day because of his broken teeth, although in my opinion it helped the men win the project to some degree. At Fortitude, the frictions among Tyana, Mahsa and Liza brought them to the boardroom and finally Tyana was fired for her complaining about the team’s concept and effectively being disloyal, while having no ideas for the video herself and no contributions to the team. Season 10 maybe was the most aggressive season I’ve ever seen. People survived the financial crisis build themselves a kind of weirdoes with intense and distrustful, which made them distinctive and impressive but negative. Here comes the in-depth analysis about this episode.
1. The key to winning this task What the anticipants need to do was to create a guerilla-marketing stunt to catch ablaze on the internet so that the company can propagandize their new product through Internet and virally spread it at low prize. In other words, this task was aim at causing a scene which could attract people’s eyes, and hope people can spread the funny videos on their own strong willing. That’s a kind of guerrilla marketing, getting maximum results from minimal resources. According to the concept definer, Guerrilla marketing was invented as an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. In my opinion, the two teams have both done a good job but it didn’t good enough to be a heating topic, since all their videos were too pretentious, lacked creativity, no public participants to enjoy the fun, and most importantly, was meaningless. So let’s take the McDonald’s “Cool off with $1 Drinks” video as an example, which I think is a fantastic way of guerrilla marketing. In the video, a huge “M”, consisted of coins frozen in a brick of ice, was set on the road, absorbing people to melting the ice then take the coins to buy a cup of drinks in the hot summer. This was a incredible new way to sell the company’s concept – delivering happiness in a low prize with attracting all the passers-by and the people on the internet by a few coins and a brick of ice in the heating summer. That’s the real way of guerilla marketing while the two teams’ videos were just a show. But, the men’s idea still could be interesting.
2. Lesson learned from the task Actually what impressed me most was the women’s leader Mahsa, a tough women working as an assistant district attorney. I don’t really like this person at all because of her aggressiveness, which made her teammates felt pressured and unwilling to work together in an effective way, leading to a bad understanding about viral videos and failure of the task. But she didn’t get fired for her overbearing, Tyana did for her disloyalty. In fact Tyana found their misunderstanding at first and has already complaint about it, however her failing to come up any solution to fix the problem but repeatedly complaining push her to the boardroom, without any contribution and just taking a backseat while others were crazily shooting videos. Don’t come to the leader with problems unless have a solution. That’s what I mainly learnt from the task. On the other hand, I always wondered that why neurotic David, aggressive Mahsa and termagant Liza haven’t been kicked out because of their poor teamwork. But with episodes passing by, I noticed that The Apprentice is not only a competition but also a show, which is bound to involve friction and fun to entertain the audience then win profits. And this may be the real business world.