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It was a good week for Tom and Helen (again) on The Apprentice, but a bad week for the British education system. The Final Five had to come up with concepts for a new fast-food chain. Project manager Jim, Susan and Natasha somehow thought that Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, would be a good name for a Mexican-themed restaurant. Maybe because Jim thought Caraca's (as the team spelt it) were actually maracas, the percussion instrument. Confused? Not as much as rivals Tom and Helen, whose all-British themed pies'n'mash chain MyPy featured such Great British names as Christopher Columbus - because as Tom put it to a strongly-agreeing Helen - Didn't Columbus discover the potato in America?

If you think that was dumb, the Great Inventor was earlier musing about whether the poet Byron was writing at the same time as Shakespeare, and whether he was a vegetarian. Moral: if your general knowledge is weak, don't shout about it until you've had time to check on Wikipedia.

MyPy survived this confusion however, so it was Jim, Susan and Natasha, sombreros drooping, who were led off to the boardroom. Jedi Jim again deserved to be fired for arrogance, not to mention the lack of organisation or a business plan. But once more his mind-control skills were in evidence and it was Natasha who rode off into the sunset. As Natasha later put it 'Jim has a dark underside' - I wonder how she knew? She accurately reminded us that his technique is to latch on to one of the other team members' faults, then mercilessly push this point, deflecting attention from his own weaknesses.Bad idea? In The Apprentice clearly not; Lord Sugar seems to be buying it, though he's now had several weeks to work out what is going on. For most in the workplace though, not to be recommended if you want to remain employed, or keep any friends.

I think Jim's survival was less to do with his own strengths, and more to do with the fact that Lord Sugar wanted to get rid of Natasha more than any of the others before the final. The easy excuse was that she should have done better because she had previously done some sort of hospitality management degree, therefore should know more about the nuts and bolts of running a restaurant. Natasha's real problem was that she started out as quite a lively character, full of energy and passion. Tough as old boots, but a contender. As the weeks went by however, she seemed always to be caught on camera sitting in the back of the car looking cheesed off - literally a passenger in most of the tasks. She just got tired.

The key takeaway (geddit?) is that over the course of a difficult task, like a dozen weeks of The Apprentice, you have to pace yourself, and not communicate your inner negativity to colleagues, which can be very demotivating. Natasha should have been a little more measured at the start, then she would not have got so worn out and it would have been easier to be more consistent. There are times for almost everyone in business when there is a critical point and you really have to push yourself to keep going; even when you feel shattered you have to keep smiling and not let it show.

Natasha couldn't bring herself to do that - she admitted on You're Fired afterwards she was probably only down to 30 per cent or her usual energy levels by the end. Her irritability and blunt put-downs, which she blamed on her tough construction-industry background, where few prisoners are taken, earned her no friends. People are always wary of those who seem to change character, starting by communicating one type of image, then turning into something altogether less pleasant - it means you can never be sure what you are going to get. That, in the end, was Natasha's downfall.

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