Raj Dhonota

Episode 11. Developing and opening a new fast food outlet and pitching it to industry experts. Jim Eastwood was team leader for Venture. Helen Louise Milligan was project leader for Logic. Logic Win. Natasha Scribbins is fired.

I hate to say I told you do but…I did! A few blogs ago I predicted that the first chance Lord Sugar gets, he is going to fire Natasha. Low and behold, he got his chance to day and took it.

Clearly Lord Sugar can justify his decision anyway he likes because there never seems to be anyone analysing his performance in the boardroom – apart from me perhaps! Today Lord Sugar felt that with Natasha he couldn’t “reconcile some of the things that happened today.” We didn’t get to find out what he meant because there was no further clarification from Lord Sugar. To me it seemed like another one of those vague criticisms to which there was no substance; made only to enable Lord Sugar to say something critical for the sake of the camera in order to fire someone when in truth it probably was not justified.

After firing Natasha, he commented that it was a tough process and if the candidates could not hack this process, it showed him that they were not capable of being his partner. Honestly, it’s not a tough process at all. The only challenge is the continual race against time and I can’t help but feel that this was another firing on the advice of the producers. Perhaps Natasha wasn’t as big a personality for them hence her card being marked early on? You would think that looking at the task, the biggest failure was from the project leader Jim Eastwood who failed (or so it was made to appear) to formulate any kind of strategy or run the numbers to see if their business was a viable one. Had Jim analysed the figures he would have known what quantity he needed to sell every hour, and this would have enabled him to select a better/easier product to make. Focusing on what he needed to sell each hour would also have indicated to him that the process he had in place to produce the food was too slow. But other than a passing criticism, this seemed of no importance to Lord Sugar when deciding who to fire.

When Natasha tried to justify her position by pointing to the fact that she had fulfilled the responsibility she was given, Lord Sugar retorted “ah ah ah you’re all in the same boat. Don’t give me ‘my responsibility’. Everyone was supposed to pipe up to make the team win.” So today Lord Sugar was looking for the “we, we, we” approach; on numerous occasions before we have seen him advise the candidates to forget the team approach, in favour of the individual approach. Karen Brady and Lord Sugar spoke about the impact of the ‘gruelling’ process on the candidates. Personally, I’m not surprised that after so many weeks the candidates are looking bewildered; but I think it perhaps has more to do with the fact they don’t know what’s coming next from Lord Sugar, than any task they are being asked to perform!

In this episode we also saw another side to Karen. Her psychic side! In the boardroom she stated that Susan had pointed out how to improve the process in the kitchen. However, Karen was not even in the car when Susan suggested it! Clearly, she must psychic powers to have known this; unless of course, it proves my point that it’s the producers who provide the main feedback to Lord Sugar! I’ll let you decide.