The third season of NBC's The Apprentice returned to the airwaves last night, with this season's first business lesson being that while Burger King's "have it your way" slogan might be an excellent approach to burger design, it apparently doesn't work so well when one attempts to apply it to project management.
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Consequently, the team found itself with not only a poorly executed promotional campaign, but also experiencing severe logistics issues in attempting to service those customers it did obtain -- resulting in Magna losing The Apprentice 3's initial challenge to the non-college educated Networth team.
Todd, a 29-year-old sales manager from Carlsbad, CA, had campaigned for the project management position following the team's discovery of what their first task would entail, citing his extensive previous restaurant experience as his reasoning.
Arriving in the boardroom to meet with Magna following his swanky victory dinner with Networth, Donald Trump quizzed the Magna team as to the cause of their failure, with nearly the entire team putting on the blame on Danny Kastner, the eccentric Magna team member entrusted with the group's marketing campaign.
Seeking to hedge his bets, in addition to Danny, Todd took Alex Thomason into the boardroom with him. Todd had appointed Alex, a 29-year-old prosecutor from Seattle, WA, as the team member tasked with managing the team's kitchen operations -- an area of responsibility that Todd claimed included the restaurant's cash register staffing decisions that, due to understaffing, were responsible for the team's service problems.
Recognizing that while Danny was a loose cannon, the responsibility for Magna's loss rested with Todd opting to remove himself from the team's key decisions and a failing to provide any leadership to the group, Trump uttered the "you're fired" phrase that no Apprentice candidate ever wants to hear, making Todd the first of the season's eighteen candidates to be eliminated from the competition.
