Blog: The Apprentice – a business remake!

The Apprentice is the closest thing we’ve got to engaging business TV, but it could be so much better.  Here’s how it could be more relevant, more interesting, more educational and more engaging:

1. The Internet: Lord Sugar is referenced as being interested in new business ideas, yet why does no one ever use the Internet?  It beggars belief that they have to scrabble through the Yellow Pages to do research.  Every single one of the challenges would have benefitted from the teams being able to use the web.
2. Contacts: contacts are a key element of how business gets done.  Yet it looks like they’re not allowed to ask for advice.  Surely, this would be a good way of testing them and make for better and more interesting outcomes.
3. Cars: everyone knows cars are the slowest way of getting round London.  Why not let them take the tube like everyone else.  And whilst we’re about it, I would swap the helicopter budget for more hand-held fast-moving camera crews (and some head cams).
4. Transparency: clearly, there are all sorts of rules that we don’t get told.  For example they only ever split into two groups per team (there must be four film crews).  This just isn’t sensible in a business context.  Presumably, same applies to use of the Internet.  Why be so prescriptive?  I thought the idea was to get them to think for themselves.
5. Social media: allied to the no internet policy, no one even mentions social media (or uses it).  Has no one on the program ever heard of Twitter or Facebook?  Presumably, use of social media would make the whole thing too real – which someone must have decided would be a bad thing!
6. Timings: the theatrical early start is formulaic and boring.  More logical to reveal the challenge the night before so teams can plan.  And sometimes the challenges would benefit from being extended over an additional day or so to give campaigns more time to play out.  And why does it always have to be 2 teams, why not spice it up by occasionally having three or more?
7. Engage with business: What about having each task introduced by a different business person having a link to the task, to give it a real world 21^st century context; rather than hearing yet again how Lord Sugar started off as a street trader etc?
8. Engage with the audience: there are so many ways in which we could get involved, from helping to select the candidates, to defining challenges, to prizes, to helping the teams with their challenge research, to judging pitches and plans.
9. Stage management: there seem to have been some strange purchasing decisions this series (especially the order for 800,000 packs of biscuits).  Clearly the orders aren’t real, so what exactly is going on?  It all feels arbitrary; where real money isn’t changing hands, I think better to simply judge pitches against defined criteria.
10. London: although there are occasional trips outside the capital, it’s too London centric; the rest of the UK also has some great City skylines and business is done outside the M25!  Much more interesting to move round the country more.
11. The boss: with the greatest respect to Lord Sugar’s many achievements over the years, he’s not a 21^st century business leader.  Why not have a different boss each series.  Perhaps one who really has an interesting apprenticeship to offer?!
12. £0.25m investment: the idea of the current series is the winner gets a £250k investment from Lord Sugar.  Yet, against this (interesting new) premise, the series has been run on exactly the same lines as before.  Wouldn’t it have made sense to at least find out about each of the candidate’s business ideas along the way?  And at the end, how about crowd-sourcing some more investment for the winner.
13. Support: one of the wonderful aspects to X Factor is the transformational journey people undergo from first audition to the later stages of the competition.  A similar approach here would see the candidates have one day a week with a business professional between tasks to help them learn and develop.  It is such a waste not to exploit this learning angle!
14. Real time: we all know it’s filmed months before we see it, but why?  Perhaps if it was real time it might get gamed too much, but is there any reason why it couldn’t be shown the week after it was filmed.  And generally, I would trade production quality for greater realism.

I guess the prevailing wisdom in TV is that once you’ve struck gold, you don’t vary the format.   But, there are so many ways this show could be perked up, made more relevant, more educational, more inspirational and more engaging.  Can we please have some courage from the programme makers and not dumb it down.  Otherwise, I think this franchise is getting tired.