Stay Focused

Totally agreed. The power of focus is an amazing thing. Living life at the summit can only occur when there is a mastery of focus.

Hear, hear!

This is a perfect example of a problem I see all too often, particularly in software development projects. The ability to understand the difference between doing a job well and doing the right job well is critical. Some developers spend far too much time on perfecting aspects of their code that will never see the light of day - and in the end, if it doesn't solve your problem, it's wasted effort.

I agree with Donald's decision since we oftentimes think it is "one" person who is mucking up the process when indeed it can be a collective situation wherein different conflicting personalities is a cause for failure.

I like that Mr. Trump has the courage to change the rules in mid stream. That's the way it is in real life... the rules can change in an instant, so you can't sit back and assume you are home free. Good for you Donald.

With all the candidates' sterling backgrounds, I have yet to see the use of a simple device as a Work Distribution Chart, i.e. a three-dimensional picture of a team: Mission, Activities (related to the mission), and Tasks (assigned to individuals related to the Activities and Mission). It may make for poorer television, but for more focused competition.

Agreed. But focusing is not everything. I believe Attitude, Ability and Acumen should take precedence in terms of being termed the corner stones of success.

*Excuse me ,I will not buy anything today, I just come here for one smile.I dont feel very well,I feel depressed lately, but You can see that in people and give them what they REALLY want.*This are the words from one lady who is regular customer of my friend Tihomir.He is florist, and makes poetry with flowers.His bussines increases exponentialy, and even was noticed from one florist from Paris. Tihomir was asked to teach him:-)

I see this all the time online. Businesses put up websites so full of eye-candy that they forget about the purpose or the message. A website that looks good and delivers the content as an after thought misses the point like your Excel team.

You think it's fun trying to read an article or a description for a product displayed with at 10 point size font? How fast do you think a customers fingers can type a competitors website address?

I love your show. The music was great. It seems so easy to do all that stuff.

Yes why do they bicker, they waste time and money, they don't put heart into these project. The point is to sell and make the product look presentable for the customers. Grown adults that act like children, and on power trips. They need to start to focus on the fact of what will make money abd how, describle your items, make them look good.

A person who can do an exemplary Work Distribution Chart already has the Attitude, Ability, and Acumen. Think of an Astronaut's mission, activities, and tasks. Only a Triple AAA could perform well, and at the risk of more than money, i.e. of life and limb.

When I sell my work, I try hard to separate the sizzle from the bacon, and the hype from the sizzle. Learn the difference.

Great points Don re sales pitch activities that distract from vs add to/feed product sales. Most people just don't get it re how world-class pitches are made and how anything that's done needs to add TO the sales process and not divert energy from the close. I try and teach them better at my online copywriting university. Those who aren't wealthy, just don't seem to "get it" re hitting the passionate sweet spot of their prospects and feeding it with actions that drive results.

Money is idea,business is idea, life is idea.Thoughts are children of Idea.Idea blossom from Frequency.Frequency are coloured with Energy.Everything moves in lovely dance between God and Godess.It is the Dance, lovely dance of Light,trapped in time and space.

I absolutely agree with Mr. Trump. Just last Friday night I, along with 10 of my girlfriends, were invited to a party which was supposed to cater to single women 40+ in age. The restaurant looked good, the food was good, the drinks were okay but what amost turned us away from the place was the music. The DJ, a 20 something cute little thing, kept playing hip hop and house music. All "her" friends were dancing up a storm but all MY friends and I, along with a lot of other people our age, were upset. No one wanted to say anything but I decided to do something that I learned from watching the Aprentice. I wrote the following on a napkin and gave it to the DJ: "Rule #1 of Selling: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE" the owner of the place is losing a lot of customers if you keep playing hip hop. Five minutes later we were dancing to #hits from the 80's and everyone had a great time. The DJ learned a HUGE lesson that night. Keep your focus, but make sure you are looking at the right thing!

Your "Fired" is a quote I have used almost 14 times myself in the last year, but I have only had the honour of two employees being let go at one time. My wife and I own a real estate company, when we bought out the firm it was full of fools,loser's and complainers, a deal was something that happened only if the stars were to align all at once. Your firing of the four contestants should have happened sooner in life for all of them, before the losers reached "your viewers of The Apprentice". A deal without a signed contract won't buy that loaf of bread for there family table,so they were not hungry. Seems to me your brand of contestants are pretty, clean cut, educated but aren't you looking for that diamond in the rough. I guess its all about TV ratings, not talent, Im hungry so I know the difference.

I agree with 'The Donald's' decision, still it surprised me a little - 4 in one go!! I couldn't help but think that possibly Mark (not Marcus) he some potential - he still lost focus, no doubt. I guess the other lesson is to be decisive and confident when you need to make a tough decision.

i have to agree these contestants u have now are pathetic at best.they lack go get it and they r all about the camera.if i had the chance to work with Mr. Trump i would not waste it on the glamour.he is smart,well educated on and off the street and has a winning plan.God to be in my 20's again

Dear Mr. Trump,

It surprises me to see that you have never said anything about being almost bankrupt. As a businessman, you certainly made some big mistakes...or to put in a decent way, some uncalculated risks.

Don't get me wrong, you're a smart man...but if it weren't for the start-up capital of your father, you probably wouldn't have come this far. So never claim that you're the intelligent self-made man because that is just not true.

I always watch your show and I truly feel you're making the right choices...but what does songwriting have to do with being creative on a business level? Sometimes it's a bit off track.....say more about your business. Give us one of your towers and tell us the story behind the building.

keep it up,

Marcel

I Tell that to people in the Gym all the time "Stay Focused" the greatest success and least risk is an automatic result.

Referring to the bad team work of excel. I don't think people know how important it is to have in a team a chain of command, because orders come from your brief and un briefd people are a waste of time.

re:Focus on where the money comes from.
How do you know the carriages were ineffective?
Did the calls come in with some identification as
inspired from the carriages or from the warm bodies?
I say no there was not.

Seems to me that it was agreed it was a good move to
abscond with the bullhorns.. which means each body on
the losing side generates less calls. Since they lost

Mr. Trump,

Why didn't you use simple algebra in the last episode of your show to determine that the warm bodies on the streets did not bring in as many calls for perfume as the carriages with ads applied to them? It was as if every single person in the board room lacked clarity and common sense during the argument on who should be fired.

If you ran your business

While I was surprised that you fired the four together, the biggest shock I had from it was in wondering what you will do to fill the other 4 show timeslots that surely have already been sold to advertisers. Otherwise, it was a good move.

About the last episode.... the horse carriages and bullhorns. While I think buying the bullhorns out from under the other team was a good move, I questioned the way it was done. Sure, it's just business, but Rebecca pretended to be from the other team and duped the sales people into selling her the bullhorns. Is that just business? Is it good business? I would have called it a con job.

If Rebecca had gone in and bought them

The recent episode where Adam was fired was the correct action for incorrect reasoning

As long as your talking about the wraping task, I also thought about the numbers related to bodies vs carriages, but the placment and actions of those people was more important then the count. The carriages also looked bad.

I totally agree with your decision to fire all four. They worked as a team, and they all had an equal part in the failure to make sales.

I have agreed with every decision thus far this season and truly believe the best two candidates remain. Alla and Felicia are both amazing individuals, but neither would be the best choice in this interview process. In the description for success, each of these candidates along with everyone else fired thus far do not possess the skills necessary for success with the Trump organization. That's the bottom line. Adam was great, but he was clearly not the strongest candidate.

Firing the four on that eventful episode was a great decision. Sometimes business needs to remember that even though they are not doctors, the decisions they make do affect lives.

I've been a follower of the Apprentice tv program and find it very interesting, due to the kinds of problem-solving tasks the teams work on and the interpersonal dynamics as they complete the tasks. Sometimes I get a sense of how things will turn out, but not always. There are initial struggles on both sides, times when things seem to be in doubt, and the team that wins tends to be not necessarily the one for whom things go smoothly, but the one that responds more resourcefully when they don't.

The sporting goods displays, for instance: the Capital Edge people, if I remember correctly, didn't know golf that well, yet chose it. Wasn't sure why, but they did seem to have a good sense of what to do to get people to buy the merchandise. They didn't have as complicated a set-up as Excel's, and the Excel team had people knowledgeable about baseball. Yet that ended up being a problem, since they then went on to make a wonderful baseball display--but as you say, got sidetracked from selling the stuff. The one team was perhaps overconfident that knowing about the sport in question would make them the winners, yet the other was able, b/c they were less knowledgeable about the sport, to find a way to use what they did know to get things done.

Another lesson: simplicity seems to succeed more often than attempting a lot of bells and whistles. The live meeting videos of both teams: Alla and Felicia had all the drop-dead graphics and flashy images, yet it seemed too "busy." Randall and Rebecca decided they could do as well as or better than the actor they brought in, so did it themselves--showed a few simple instances of why Live Meeting was a great idea, and won.

Friends laugh at my interest in this and a couple other reality shows, but I think they offer a variation on "street theater" and, in the case of the Apprentice in particular, I sometimes try to imagine how I'd handle a particular task, so it's creative exercise.

A couple of concerns though:

1. On one program, a woman (Angie, I think) appeared to be having one of those "bad hair days" that can happen to anyone, and she was increasingly stressed, not handling it as well as anyone would like, herself included. You fired her, and while I understood your decision, I thought your comments about her after she left seemed unduly harsh: "nobody likes a choker, and she's a choker." It seems to me that to sum her up with that one word ignores the fact that she made it as far as she did, that she had done a good job on other tasks, that she was more than the sum of that day. I don't think human beings can or should be summed up

Perhaps there are more things going on at once in any organization, enterprise, empire or whatever one chooses to call the conglomerate of commercial activities ammased

First of all I think this show is a great way to see what immature upcoming business folks are like. Professionals?? I wouldn't go that far, maybe Randall, to see the way these people work with others in a "professional" situation is frankly just disapointing. Mr. Trump I'd like to know what kind of screening process you have when interviewing these contestants that you'd allow such people as someone like Josh who does nothing BUT point fingers at someone else in the group for the loss of the a task or Marcus, who some how luckily slipped through the most of the season and not contributing anything but headaches. Furthermore, the tasks that have been created for these contestants have been quite interesting for these people to overcome, but very few of the tasks have really been done well except maybe the Capital Edge win with Dicks or the Pontiac advertisement for the new car episode in the past season. I don't know what these people have done in the past to make them selves so successful, frankly I'm constantly amazed each episode that most the people made past through your interview process. I'm starting to think that you put most of the people on the show as fillers. They're jokes, clowns!!! Mr. Trump I didn't like you before the show but you grew on me, I like your business ethics and your straight to business attitude it keeps you sharp and a hard worker, I like the business you created and real estate you own, but I hope in the future you "change your rules" and pick some more professional acting, civilized contestants who can take your fortunate opportunity to prove themselves, learn from you, others, and their mistakes instead of going out pointing fingers at someone else because of their mistakes. When deals or events go bad professionals should always evaluate the situation and see all sides of the spectrum and see where each party might have done something different to make the sale. When put in a team everybody needs to work together, if that team doesn't win they all need to look back at their own contributions or lack of, what ever needs to be done to prevent losses from happening again should be discussed in the board room not behind each others backs.Most of the constants on these shows have not show this yet. And they call themselves "professionals" ya right!!!

I was not surprised at the firing of certain people on the apprentice. One episode in particular where the people had to advertise a 1800 free call number to give away perfume and these clowns were running around trying to buy megaphones - I solved this problem in 2 seconds flat [ try a music store - 250watt music speakers, radio mike - beats the hell out of megaphones can be heard for blocks, mount speakers in pickup boom boom!!! In fact I got solutions in every program that wasen't even thought of but can I get brain dead people in this country [ Australia ] to think out of the box ? no, can I have a job please ?

Wehen it comes to Real Estate - I believe that throughout history Genghis Khan may have built the largest and greatest Empire of all times - makng sure he collected from a great many "tenenats". For some reason though I don't believe that he was concerned with the price per sqaure foot he was getting for his porperties, but rather his theory worked more on the prinicple that the winner takes all, also a noticeable phenomenon in modern day network theory, perhaps the best example in today's world so far being Bill Gates' Microsoft.

Throughout American History, including the New York Cityt (Manhattan) area I believe Vanderbuilt was a leader in the New York Real Estate Market, purchasing large lots of land and splitting them up into smaller parcels for individuals to rent from him,

Perhaps we could take a look at the Trump Apartments anywhere in the Trump Tower and subdivide them into smaller work spaces.

I questioned someone recently as to why the sizes of homes have decreased since Vanderbilt's days and he said that this has happened because people no longer need such large homes with so much space.

Perhpas we should all look towards the trends coming in the future?

At the same time I do see an upsizing trend of some of the middle priced homes - to larger amounts of square footage of living space. Whether the upkeep of these spacious homes is maintainable or not we shall se in the distant future -

Mr. Trump, On the white-board in my office, I have written the words,

OK, but looking at your focus - is the main point of your Apprentice to develop leaders in business? What if instead of firing them, when they are unsuccessful, they have the opportunity to re-approach the task a second time? You could require them to perform at a higher level than those who succeeded the second time around, while those who succeeded the first time get an educational fieldtrip or a bonus session. Failure can become the best learning experience when you have time to reflect and plan for "next time".