I have an MBA from The Wharton School. Yes, the same school where our president-elect received his bachelors degree, as he likes to remind us. I don’t watch much TV, but as an MBA, I had a natural curiosity about “The Apprentice”, so I decided to tune in for an episode. This was back in the day when the show was still in production, long before Trump ran for president. I had no political motivation for watching or judging the show.
For those of you who haven’t see “The Apprentice”, contestants were divided into two teams and were assigned a business project. At the end of the episode, they presented the project to be judged, and the losing team was sent to a board room meeting with Trump, who made a decision on which team member was most responsible for the failure. That member was told, in dramatic fashion, “You’re fired!”
In this particular episode, the project was to create an advertising campaign for a tropical resort hotel. The losing team had 4 members. The key players in this project was two men, who I’ll call “Bob” and “Jeff”, since I don’t remember their real names.
Jeff was the project manager. He began the process by calling a brainstorming session. Bob was the first one to speak up. He offered a weird suggestion about a guy who had lost his way and would eventually wind up at the resort. It was hard to understand exactly what the concept was going to be, but Jeff immediately said, “OK, let’s do it!” I was surprised he ended the session after hearing just one idea, but that’s what happened.
The final presentation was bizarre and confusing, which wasn’t a surprising result when the initial concept was so fuzzy. The judges’ decision was a no-brainer.
What shocked me was Donald Trump’s decision-making process on which team member to fire. Trump asked only one question of the group: Who’s idea was it? Since Bob had been the one to come up with the idea, Trump decided that Bob should be the one who was fired.
I don’t think it takes an MBA to see that this was a bone-headed decision based on obviously poor reasoning. The fault was clearly Jeff’s. He was responsible for making the decision to go with that concept He failed to properly run the brainstorming session.
But it’s even worse than just making a poor decision. With his thinking on this, Trump fails Management 101. A manager should create an environment that encourages success. By firing Bob, Trump sends the message that coming up with ideas and suggestions puts an employee’s job at risk. Even if you have an idea in a brainstorming session, you’re better off keeping it to yourself. A company run this way probably wouldn’t stay in business for very long.
If this episode is an indication of Trump’s management skill, it’s no wonder he drove 6 companies into bankruptcy. It’s no wonder this “successful businessman” actually earned less of a return on investment than a stock index fund. It’s scary that this is the guy voters were conned into electing to run the United States government on the basis of his business acumen.
This is a guy that has to be carefully monitored and held accountable. If he fucks up, as seems likely, this needs to be made clear to everyone so that, in 2020, the voters will tell Trump, “You’re fired!”. Unless Congress does it first.