CorpComms Magazine

At the start of this week's The Apprentice the teams were called to the British Museum, because the task was all about selling beauty treatments in Birmingham. Why? Don't ask - the producers' choice of briefing locations gets more bizarre every series. Generally-smiley Felicity was made one of the team leaders because Lord Sugar 'hasn't see much of her' - always a bad sign.

The other project leader this time was flat-voiced Zoe. She was generally uninspiring, though her team did score a coup by securing the spray-tanning treatment that both teams wanted. Team-mate Susan was squealing with excitement about this treatment as it had the highest profit potential - or was it more the oily pecs of the male model demonstrating it?

Anyway, it convinced the owners that her team had the requisite enthusiasm, whereas Felicity's lot weren't quite so fawningly over the top. Losing this highly profitable treatment basically meant losing the task. Lesson: demonstrating passion and enthusiasm are key when trying to secure the services of a supplier who has many other choices. Sometimes you have to lay it on with a thick trowel and over-act a bit.

One of the key communications issues this week was the importance of listening skills - or lack of them. Nerdy Tom tried to point out to Felicity that her selection of a pitch at the Bull Ring centre with only a single treatment room way up on the third floor might be a bad idea. Was Felicity listening? Of course not, and in uncharacteristically irritable mode, she slapped him down for his trouble. It proved a major mistake, as she later admitted.

Both teams over-spent on beauty products to sell, as they hadn't listened closely enough when the good Lord pointed out that the task was really about spa treatments, with their much higher margins. For Felicity's team the penny didn't drop until far too late in the day, when she finally realised they had spent far too much time trying to sell iffy products (hideous hair extensions and suchlike), leaving Ellie and Tom twiddling their thumbs in an empty treatment room. Felicity might have been able to pull things round if she'd been aware of this earlier, but she was not attuned to the signals indicating that all was not well upstairs.

In the boardroom afterwards came another of Lord Sugar's hilarious ad-libs - 'You've done the beauty stuff, now you have to deal with the beast - ie me'. The boss was not impressed with Felicity's lack of awareness of what was going on, although as he pointed out in far from subtle terms, Ellie and Tom could take a lot of the blame for simply sitting there for far too long instead of running down to the sales team, and shaking Felicity warmly by the throat until she started to send some customers up. Felicity though was the one who 'departed the process'. As so often on this programme, it's knowing who to listen to that really counts.

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