Day dreams

Due to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances, the writer of this blog was unable to write for the last couple of weeks......blah blah blah
I wish i could come up with a really interesting reason for my absence like i was sequestered on a remote beach off the coast of Zanzibar, away from civilisation, no cell phones, no Internet......ha, this is what my daydreams are made of. Anyway, one can dream, right?
I mean if i was one of the contestants on the Apprentice Africa, I'd have a 1 in 18 chance of earning 200,000 dollars and i would actually have a shot at turning my day dreams into some semblance of reality. Someone please remind me to audition if ever there is another Apprentice Africa.

Its really easy to sit here and criticize the contestants' efforts and say you could have done this and that better but you really never know, do you? Its one thing to be confident in one's own self as i am sure everyone of the 18 was going into this competition but the reality is another thing altogether. Probably why they are no longer 18 and the number keeps dwindling every week to the point that an elimination/survival strategy has come into play especially in the Zulu corp.

The twists and turns in this competition could leave one a little confused if you don't watch carefully. This week, Bank PHB officials were so critical of Zulu's newspaper insert to the point that i thought someone was going to get fired there and then only for Zulu Corp to emerge as the winners of the task in the boardroom. This is actually not the first time something like this has happened but i guess they are entitled to change their minds or is it a case of the whole TAA team sitting down and deciding not who was the best, but which of the two groups did worse than the other.

In every boardroom session of the six weeks that the competition has been running, all the project managers have come close to being fired and in fact four of the six people fired so far were project managers. This whole business of someone stepping up to be PM just for the sake of it is quite ridiculous. I think one should assess the task given and decide whether you can lead your team to excel in that particular area..

In week 2, it was Michelle whose team Matrix failed to come up with a new, innovative, viable financial product for Bank PHB although she herself is a banker, so out she went. Her argument was that there is hardly anything new in the market so she decided to take already existing products, merge them, package them differently........

In week 3, Anthony's team failed to come up with a "combo" for chicken inn and to manage one of their fast food outlets for a day, well, some hours. As leaders come, Anthony is just not one. He wasn't where he needed to be and his argument later in the boardroom was that he assigned everyone tasks and he just expected them to deliver.

In week 4, Zulu corp picking Omar as their project manager was merely an elimination strategy as they knew he would suck as a leader and in the boardroom, they'd just kill him. Fortunately for them, this worked our perfectly as in a weird twist of events, team leaders were switched and Omar ended up at Matrix corp and Kathleen at Zulu.

Omar did not think too highly of his teammates at Matrix as he believed losing was in their DNA, etc, his words, not mine.I could say a lot about that but i won't make this personal, i will not let the feminist in me tear out his eyes though i want to. So Omar took on his role as a leader like an autocratic husband assigning duties to his various wives according to their strengths. It was quite hilarious, he actually convened a meeting and asked them each to tell him what her strength was.

Did i mention that the task was to decorate a hotel room to the standards fit for an international businessman like the CEO, an area where you would think that the ladies would excel but then again, its not always a certainity. At the end of the day, Matrix corp ended up with a very homely room in line with their theme of home away from home whereas Zulu corp had a businessman's room complete with a laptop.

Omar was later criticised by the CEO in the boardroom for not bringing a "manly" feel to the room and for not being an involved leader. He "supervised" and of all the people he could choose to take to the boardroom, he chose to take Bekeme and Eunice! two women with two very strong characters, he really didn't stand a chance and it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to get fired although he was strategizing to have Bekeme fired as she stood up to him, very vocally, i might add.

In week 5, Akatu got fired and i felt that it was just a case of somebody had to go and unfortunately it had to be him. I believe there was a lot more to him than he showed, perhaps it was just his strategy gone wrong in that he was biding his time before he gave us the best of himself. On the other hand, in whatever you do, you must always give your best, right? He had previously been criticized by Deox and Eddie for being flamboyant but with no actual results, more of a talker than a doer.

In week 6, Matrix lost and Joyce their PM ended up performing an act of self sacrifice. First of all, she picked the wrong people to take back into the boardroom, Eunice had come up with a solid concept and Regina, well, she is the nice little quiet sweetheart and she had actually worked hard on the task. She could have picked others on the team who had not had that much input. That said, she could not lay the blame on any of the two people she picked and so she felt like she had to shoulder it herself and on top of that, she was being "nice."

Now the debate is raging on whether this whole "integrity" thing is a Kenyan thing as Joyce seemed to echo Anthony in the boardroom saying she took responsibility for their loss. I don't agree, its completely a personal thing otherwise, this chaos with Kibaki and Odinga wouldn't be, would it now?