Fowl Play in The Apprentice

I know The Apprentice is set up and edited to make great TV, but I'm still astonished at the basic failings it reveals each show of these young business people.

Every week they are given a task and spend next to no time planning and researching. Last night they were trying to find sundry items in Marrakesh and spent a lot of time running around like headless chickens (and there was a halal butcher just waiting to make a few more chickens headless for them.) At least Lee's team had researched where to get kosher chicken- Jennifer's team didn't even research what 'kosher' meant. None of them seemed to have a clear plan as to how their day's shopping was going to pan out or any contingencies for things going wrong.

Once again there was poor teamwork. They should know by now the strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues and yet Jennifer let Claire twice sabotage Alex's bartering with shop owners. Despite or perhaps because success depends on teamwork, it seems many of the candidiates have been deliberately chosen because they are poor team players who believe the way to personal victory is to undermine their rivals.

Worse of all last night was Jenny's decision to try to bribe a shopkeeper into not providing tennis rackets to the rival team. There is some debate about whether this might be a legitimate business practice but this argument takes the view that business is a dog-eat-dog world. To some extent, business is about survival of the fittest but a successful market economy is supposed to deliver value and that depends on following rules and behaving fairly in order to provide best value. For example, it's legitimate to win a contract through making the best bid but if you win it through bribery (or by operating a cartel) the end user does not get the best value. Jenny could have helped her team to victory by her unfair tactic but the winning team was supposed to be the one who found the right products at the best price.

It is perhaps not surprising that Jenny thought she might get brownie points for her underhand behaviour since many big firms have indulged in unfair practices. Microsoft have been fined by the EU for anti-competitive practices; BA indulged in dirty tricks against Virgin Atlantic. Before we give up trying to do business honestly, it's worth considering that if the shop manager had accepted a bribe, the shop owner would have been out-of-pocket. Translated to a bigger scale, if she had accepted a bribe from a competitor to sabotage sales, the shop owner might have been out-of-business, and ultimately customers would end up paying higher prices because of the lack of competition.