Now in its second week, BBC’s The Apprentice parades twenty-somethings each week with critically important business missions to complete. They all have such important sounding titles such as ‘Entrepreneur’, ‘International Car Trader’ and ‘Global Pricing Leader’ (my personal favourite). The mind boggles.
But The Apprentice is so addictive because it’s like watching a car crash happen in slow motion.
As the viewer, you’re left in a state of suspended animation – knowing what will happen next but powerless to influence the inevitable outcome: a disaster for one of the hapless teams sent on a mission by Alan Sugar (why does he insist on being called Sir Alan?) and the firing squad assembled in the boardroom that will dispatch that week’s latest victim to business oblivion.
It’s great telly, but what on earth does it say about modern business or for that matter being an apprentice? Of course that’s not the point of the show, so I’ll move on.
What The Apprentice has done – brilliantly – is put business and entrepreneurship on the map as a career choice for millions of aspiring ‘Apprentice-type’ candidates up and down the length of the country. God knows, we need them!
In order to improve their chances of getting on the show, perhaps these new ‘captains of industry-to-be’ should get hold of a copy of Making It, preferably before they fill out the BBC’s application form for the show.
The book demonstrates the road to success is full of potholes. Each of the 11 entrepreneurs featured had to overcome challenges, issues and mistakes – very often of a personal nature.
Kanya King had the vision to create the world’s foremost urban music and awards show. That was a decade ago and MOBO is a now a phenomenal success today, but at the start she felt isolated, working on her own out of her bedroom.
Ben Kenne’s idea was to create an online community and real world tribe – http://www.tribewanted.com/. More than 1,000 tribe members from 20 countries registered in a matter of months.
“It was a pretty rapid start and definitely gave us a false sense of security…Then the reality started to kick in,” explains Keene. That blip was a malicious viral campaign created by a US blogger who almost put Keene and his partner out of business. They survived and an observational documentary of Tribewanted was recently broadcast by the BBC.
So budding Apprentice applicants should take heart – be prepared to learn from your mistakes and triumph over adversity. Most successful people have.
Making It is published by Crimson Business in conjunction with Sony VAIO. Price £11.99, available from
www.crimsonpublishing.com
Ardi Kolah was named one of the top 50 thinkers in the marketing world by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and is a Director of MOBO
