Okay, I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve been watching The Apprentice when I happen to be home on Thursday evenings. It’s pretty fascinating to see the different strategies towards the challenges that people take; some are free-wheeling, some want to lay out a process and a plan, etc. But the thing that I originally thought was genius was the boardroom scenes where Trump asks them to assign blame for failure. It generally turns into a free-for-all and a lot of bad feelings get raised. And then the teammates have to go back and try to accomplish the next task together. Unfortunately, it appears that the boardroom scenes are so disruptive to team morale that once a team starts losing, they continue losing because they don’t trust each other any more. The men lost the first week, and then proceeded to lose the next three weeks, and I don’t think it was necessarily because the women were that much more competent than the men. It will be interesting to see if my theory holds up over the next few weeks now that the teams have been reshuffled; will the new Protege team that lost last week continue to lose? I suspect so. Teams are a delicate thing, and it doesn’t make much resentment or ill will to totally destroy a smoothly functioning team. And I think that’s what we’re seeing on The Apprentice.