9pm Monday evening. As usual, I sit down with my other half and watch Young Apprentice on the Beeb. I don’t know why I set myself up for an hour of raised blood pressure and shouting at the TV week after week, but some sort of morbid curiosity means I tune in weekly.
So what’s the problem? On the face of it, the program encourages the best of British young entrepreneurs to compete for an investment from one of the UK’s top business moguls.
However, when you start to look at the details, you’ll see that the program is driven by what I would consider to be some of the less desirable and possibly out-dated virtues of business. Profit is king here, and extreme short-termism.
This leads to, in my opinion, the team with the inferior idea winning each week’s task and the idea which might have longer term success is torn to pieces in a fierce blame-culture exercise.
Even within the winning team, candidates in ‘the process’ are encouraged to pick faults in each other and generally act in a pretty abysmal way towards each other.
I’m aware that this is turning into a bit of a rant, but in summary I think that this program is ethically falling quite short of the mark and encouraging would-be young entrepreneurs to exhibit what I consider to be pretty negative traits.
Daniel Keighron-Foster
Managing Director
Totally with your here Daniel.
The Apprentice (and I assume the Young Apprentice is even worse) ie exactly what is wrong about the UK. Had Sugar had any nouse at all, he would have checked component quality on his Amstrad machines before he sold them, not let the customer find out. Then he would have capitalised on his 2 year march over everyone else in Europe. He coujld have been a Michael Dell.
But no, he is a short term, sell rubbish cheap who managed to persuade Sky to let him build boxes and has made most of his money in property. He knows nothing about technology except how to sell..I stopped watching it a few years ago – The Apprentice is Big Brother on steroids where young Sugar-fans ape the man to see whether they can sell their own grandmothers.
Don’t get me wrong – we need salesmen but we also need to recognise that only with the best products does the customer come back so the effort of the original sale is repaid many times. Why else do people carry on buying German cars? And how many British companies can you name in the same breath as Mercedes, BMW, Toyota….. Probably only Rolls Royce.
Or the BBC Micro and ARM chips and Raspberry Pi – yes we are good as some things as long as the education system allows people to learn …. Help nearly another rant!