The BBC Reports:
We witnessed an Apprentice first this week with the double firing. Booted out of the competition were black belt martial arts expert Ifti and the bankrupt entrepreneur Rory.
First to go was Ifti, who seemed to have run out of steam. Looking at Ifti’s dull eyes and blank expression in the boardroom was quite a change from the excited Ifti we saw exclaiming that ‘this is the life’ on entering the Notting Hill house in week one.
He appeared to have withdrawn into himself, admitting to Sir Alan that he contributed nothing during the task and missed his wife and son. After being fired, he sloped out of the door looking quite relieved to be going home.
Luckily, the experience doesn’t appear to have affected his self-confidence. In the taxi, Ifti boldly states that ‘I will be a millionaire by the time I’m 50′.
On the other hand, Rory - ‘I’m the boss!’ - project-manager-from-hell, appeared to be going barking mad in his quest to come up with an ‘innovative’ dog product.
From the word go, he told his team that ‘discipline’ was something he went ‘crazy for’. Throwing his pencil across the table, flashing his Moet & Chandon cufflinks, he told the boys he wouldn’t stand for swearing, and that was after including at least two swearwords in his little speech. It was no wonder that the boys struggled for ideas from the outset.
His leadership style was unusual. Adam compared him to a teacher from Victorian times. Was his dictatorial style something learned at school? Clearly his education was an influential part of his life. Not only does he wear his old school tie with pride, watch the exclusive clip to see Rory’s face light up when he drives past his old school!
Stumbling through the task, Rory also had a somewhat questionable opinion of his target market. ‘Find out what dogs the chavs have’, he told his research team. Then later, after ignoring a sensible idea for a dog blanket, he turned to the camera sneering that he was going with the pouch because it’s something you can just ‘add a load of rubbish too’. But as team mate Tre pointed out, ‘who’s going to spend thirty quid on a strap when you can put a ball and bottle of water in your pocket?’.
The bumbling Rory wanted to ‘kick arse’ but ended up having his own whipped. Ifti called Rory ‘ a very bad manager’ and Tre thought ‘he had dug his own grave’, and it was clear he walked back into the boardroom a dying man.
His spineless tactics to ‘poach a bit of the other and ultimately kill off two’ didn’t wash with Sir Alan and his aides, and Rory was out of the door faster than a piece of old dog dirt. ‘You’re a disaster’, barked Sir Alan.
In the taxi home Rory held Tre responsible for his downfall, but it was too late for the blaming game. This is The Apprentice and only the strong survive.
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