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Last night The Apprentice lost one of its most entertaining candidates - global smarty-pants Melody Hossaini, who finally talked herself out of the chance of setting up a business with Lord Sugar. She could certainly talk the talk, but this time she walked the walk as well - straight into the waiting taxi. This week the task was to take some assorted items that Lord Sugar's team had assembled at a north London wholesalers, sell them at retail prices, then reinvest the profits in picking up more of the most successful lines - 'smelling what sells' as the Amstrad founder put it - (better than the other way around, I suppose).

Team leaders were Natasha and Melody, and neither seemed to have a clue what they were doing. Lord Sugar was so unimpressed by Natasha's Team Venture that he arbitrarily fined them £100 for not reinvesting enough (yet another case of not listening properly to the initial briefing on the aims and objectives of the task). When even that wasn't enough to stop them from winning, he prevented them from enjoying the usual winners' treat - or maybe the BBC budget cuts were starting to bite.

So to lose under these circumstances, Melody's team must have performed particularly poorly - and they did, despite including what had appeared to be some of the brightest talent of this year's series. This was Helen's first time on the losing team, and she did herself no favours by having come up with the bonkers strategy of trying to sell on to retailers at much lower margins, rather than the public. Melody meanwhile is one of those people who arrives on the scene with such impressive credentials, that people tend to suspend rational judgement, at least until it finally dawns on them that she may be as full of hot air as all the others. She makes great play of her high-level achievements, even claiming as a teenager to have set up 'one of the most successful democratic projects in the world'. Your mobile phone contacts list may be full of people with names like Bill and Jim; hers apparently contains Al Gore, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

However Melody had little strategy on this task, exasperating team-mate Helen to such an extent that she volunteered to take over as Project Manager midway through. Not surprisingly, Melody rejected this kind offer, but it was beginning to dawn on her how much pressure she was under.

Melody tends to talk so much that she has little time, or inclination, to listen to the views of others. She is not exactly a team player - forceful and usually defensive, she really isn't interested in whether other people disagree with her or not. Her youthful accomplishments now seem to have become a handicap, by giving her so much confidence in her own abilities; she assumes she is always right. In the boardroom, Lord Sugar admitted her CV was impressive but began to wonder what Melody had actually achieved, as he didn't really understand her business. Karren Brady put the final boot in by suggesting that if he were to go into business with Melody, the board meetings would be a very very long affair. Lesson: the cleverest person doesn't always get the job, it's the person the boss can see him/herself working with.

On You're Fired afterwards, the combined talents of Dara O'Briain and Ruby Wax were still unable to extract from Melody a clear explanation of what her business actually does (apparently it's a 'social enterprise' to do with 'supporting young people to combine passion with skills to enable them to achieve their vision'). Or something like that.

Melody frequently proclaimed herself a communications expert, but communication has to be two-way, and like all too many people I meet in this field, she couldn't clearly convey the essence of her business in a way that would resonate with people and be easily understandable. I think everyone in a company should if possible be able to explain the basics of 'this is who we are, this is what we do and this is why we think its good'. If they don't know, how is anybody else supposed to? Unfortunately for Melody, it was a Niagara of words - but a Sahara of meaning. We should all learn the lesson.

www.mediatrainingassociates.co.uk

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