The Apprentice Analysed

The Apprentice Week 12: Yes to Yasmina as Walsh walks

The Apprentice Analysed's long predicted winner, Yasmina Siadatan, was finally hired by Sir Alan Sugar last night, leaving our equally long predicted runner up, Kate Walsh, as the disappointed losing finalist.

The final task, to design and promote a new brand of chocolates, whilst closely contested, highlighted Yasmina's strengths and Kate's weaknesses and saw our league leader increase the gap over her rival.

Kate's strengths, on our Leadership Radar, was in the People arena. She is a good communicator, diplomatic and firm when she needs to be. However she is weaker in the Thought part of our model, lacking innovation and ingenuity. More critically though she lacks focus on the ultimate goal meaning that she can deviate from the task in hand.

On the other hand, Yasmina is always clear about what is to be achieved. Having established the objectives and the framework, she trusts the team members to do their individual tasks.

Yasmina was also the one who displayed the most potential: she listened to feedback, was self critical as well as being totally dedicated and driven. This was displayed again tonight when asked what her greatest achievement was. She chose her presentation on the final show as this was where she was stretched the most rather than choosing a moment of real triumph. She chose something that represented her greatest challenge rather than her greatest achievement.

There are rough edges to Yasmina's profile, most notably her brusqueness on occasion, but an apprenticeship is a learning process and an education leading to someone becoming highly skilled in their chosen profession and she has all the qualities to be a success.

From week 3 we identified Yasmina as the potential winner and and Kate as runner up and from week 5 we identified the top five. I mention this not as a source of satisfaction but some considerable relief too.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE
Senior Partner, Pearn Kandola