Apprentice TV Show candidate speaks out
Apprentice 101: Candidate Alex rates competitors on high-profile job bid
By MAUREEN MORIARTYSPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER
One of the final four candidates on the third season of "The Apprentice," Alex Thomason, 29, was raised on an apple farm in Brewster, attended Seattle University School of Law and was a King County deputy assistant prosecutor before he became one of the nine "book smart" candidates, those with impressive academic credentials.
He spoke with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about leadership and his time on the show.
Question: Anything you would like to share about anything that wasn't on the show to set the record straight?
Answer: You are teaching lessons from the show and have to take what is aired at its face value. What happens behind the scenes can be entirely different. If I were to give you a list of things about what actually transpired versus what is edited, it would take me all week. In the Pontiac show they showed me napping and showed Kendra working all through the night. Tana and Craig actually were there until 4:30 in the morning. Tana was actually going to fire Kendra because Kendra was doing such a poor job and couldn't come up with any ideas.
Q: Is there any coaching behind the scenes from the producers of the show?
A: No, although as a lawyer I did read through the FCC guidelines that govern fixing of game shows, so I was aware of that and was looking for it. But there was nothing that was fixed. The only thing fixed is the arbitrary and sometimes capricious judgment of Mr. Trump, which really isn't based on somebody's performance. It's based on some other sort of standard that he has. He is hiring someone according to his own interests, which is what an employer should do but it isn't necessarily according to the basis of their performance on the show or task.
Q: Why do you think you were chosen of all the thousands of applicants who applied?
A: (Laughs). When I got off the show, I was talking with one of the psychologists in an exit interview. One of the things I said to her was that Bren and I slipped through the cracks. Mr. Trump knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. To get on the show, you have to have a big successful track record. The bigger component is what goes on in you -- they are really choosing personalities. People do not vote for issues, they vote for people. The same thing is true of the show, they choose people.
Q: Did you think he should have fired Tana instead of you the week you were fired?
A: I came up with 80 percent of the ideas, and we split the work equally. I never sat back on any task, which was the reason George and Carolyn wanted to have Tana fired. Trump knew that, which was why it was dubbed in later. I recognized we were missing something in marketing. My alarms were going off and on that basis, he should have fired Tana. But he wanted to hire Tana because he is an employer and he likes her better for whatever reasons. I am totally OK with that.
Q: At what point did you think you were going to lose?
Thomason knew that his fate was sealed during the American Eagle task, even though he wasn't fired for the mishaps there.
A: The American Eagle task. We were late for that interview because someone from American Eagle told our models to go home. When Carolyn saw me running around the street trying to hail any cab to send the models to their appointment, I saw a look on her face and I knew my fate was sealed at that point. Having said that, I knew as an unimpeachable fact that I would be fired when Tana and I found out we lost that task. Trump has the worst poker tell. When he splits the groups up (between the winners who get the reward and the losers) and says "where one of you will be fired," he glances at the person he is going to fire. I saw it with Erin, John, Angie, Bren, Chris and then with me. I knew for a fact, I was going to be fired. ... Nothing I could have said or done would have saved me.
Q: What business and leadership lessons did you learn through this experience?
A: If you act how you see people act in the boardroom in real life, you will be fired and you will have no friends and you will be a dismal failure. So what you see in the boardroom, you should do the opposite. If there is fault to be had, you should take ownership. And if there is praise to be received then you should give it to someone else.
The thing that is completely false in the Trump world is that you deny accountability. You deny and you counteraccuse and that is the worst thing you can ever do both in work and in your personal relationships.
Q: Your opinion of Trump's leadership skills?
A: He is very generous. He operates very clearly on motivating on fear and through money and praise. So if you do a good job he praises you. If you do a bad job, he says bad things to you. It's not my leadership style. I take more of an interest in the development of people that I am with other than the end goal. You can end up in the winner's circle but everyone around you is bloodied and dead and hates your guts. I think that is a weak leadership pattern. You will never find me running my business like Trump does. I think it is ineffectual and very short term.
Q: How did being an attorney help or hinder you in the competition?
A: People know how to argue more or less from their upbringing but the biggest thing being an attorney did was to prepare me to go into the boardroom and not take arguments personally.
Chris, Angie, Kristen and Erin were like wounded little birds. They felt they were decimated and portrayed so poorly and they're on this crusade to show how wonderful they are.
Q: What did you learn about being an entrepreneur from the show?
A: It's easy to get things started. People like Chris, he came from a very rich family. I came from a town without a single stoplight. I realized that everyone can succeed equally in this country. Sometimes it is just luck, but if you work hard and are diligent and persevere. I believe success will come your way.
Q: What do you think are the most important leadership characteristics?
A: Tana is a good leader because she is able to defuse hot situations and to affirm people. Kendra is a poor leader because she is interested in showing that she is right. She and Craig bicker non-stop. Craig is so easily controlled, if you just affirm what he is saying, restate it and then suggest a mutually beneficial goal. Tana will affirm when someone disagrees, state the best way to meet the goal and tell them -- let's move forward.
Q: What do you think Trump is looking for in an apprentice?
A: He is looking for someone who is just plain tough. You have to be hard. The reason why Stephanie got fired was not because she was delivering pizzas. She said the stupidest thing you could ever say to Mr. Trump. She said she wasn't used to working with someone rude and hard. He is looking for someone tough.
Q: Do you think Tana is polished?
A: Without a doubt. She has no equal in sales on the show. ... Kendra is a great marketer. Can you train somebody who isn't a leader to be a leader?
Q: Weigh in -- street or book smarts?
A: If you go to college you learn to be deferential, you learn to be winsome and genial. You don't learn how to interact with ideas unless you go to college. The biggest difference is those who don't go to college are not used to listening to other people speak. They are used to fighting it out to be heard.
Q: Does Chris have an anger management problem?
A: Chris has a pride problem. He said to me, "Mr. Trump said I was a crazy person. What should I do?" He asked me to mentor him. I told him we needed to open up the book of Proverbs and see how to speak in front of kings.
I said, "You are a fool. Every way that a fool does is right in your own eyes. Everybody else has a problem but you, and that is the reason why Trump said you were a crazy person. ... You think what you are doing is just fine but you don't realize how other people are perceiving it."
Chris said he needed to change, and we had Bible studies in the morning. He became much more coachable, but as time went on he became tired again and slipped back into those old patterns. ...
Q: Best advice for future "Apprentice" candidates?
A: Sleep whenever you can. Be prepared to work 2 1/2 days at a time with no sleep and be happy about it. When you lose, see that as an opportunity to have a one-on-one interview with Donald Trump. This is your real chance to shine and your one-on-one chance to play ball before the king.
Q: Do you think coming from a small town in Washington gave you any edge?
A: Without a doubt. I grew up in a small town where you ... value everyone the same. Nobody is better, and nobody is worse. When I met Trump, as far as I was concerned, he was just another guy.
ABOUT THE SERIES
What can real-world business leaders learn from the NBC series "The Apprentice"? That's the question the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posed to Maureen Moriarty, who uses the show as a teaching tool in her Bellevue Community College leadership course.
By MAUREEN MORIARTYSPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER
One of the final four candidates on the third season of "The Apprentice," Alex Thomason, 29, was raised on an apple farm in Brewster, attended Seattle University School of Law and was a King County deputy assistant prosecutor before he became one of the nine "book smart" candidates, those with impressive academic credentials.
He spoke with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about leadership and his time on the show.
Question: Anything you would like to share about anything that wasn't on the show to set the record straight?
Answer: You are teaching lessons from the show and have to take what is aired at its face value. What happens behind the scenes can be entirely different. If I were to give you a list of things about what actually transpired versus what is edited, it would take me all week. In the Pontiac show they showed me napping and showed Kendra working all through the night. Tana and Craig actually were there until 4:30 in the morning. Tana was actually going to fire Kendra because Kendra was doing such a poor job and couldn't come up with any ideas.
Q: Is there any coaching behind the scenes from the producers of the show?
A: No, although as a lawyer I did read through the FCC guidelines that govern fixing of game shows, so I was aware of that and was looking for it. But there was nothing that was fixed. The only thing fixed is the arbitrary and sometimes capricious judgment of Mr. Trump, which really isn't based on somebody's performance. It's based on some other sort of standard that he has. He is hiring someone according to his own interests, which is what an employer should do but it isn't necessarily according to the basis of their performance on the show or task.
Q: Why do you think you were chosen of all the thousands of applicants who applied?
A: (Laughs). When I got off the show, I was talking with one of the psychologists in an exit interview. One of the things I said to her was that Bren and I slipped through the cracks. Mr. Trump knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. To get on the show, you have to have a big successful track record. The bigger component is what goes on in you -- they are really choosing personalities. People do not vote for issues, they vote for people. The same thing is true of the show, they choose people.
Q: Did you think he should have fired Tana instead of you the week you were fired?
A: I came up with 80 percent of the ideas, and we split the work equally. I never sat back on any task, which was the reason George and Carolyn wanted to have Tana fired. Trump knew that, which was why it was dubbed in later. I recognized we were missing something in marketing. My alarms were going off and on that basis, he should have fired Tana. But he wanted to hire Tana because he is an employer and he likes her better for whatever reasons. I am totally OK with that.
Q: At what point did you think you were going to lose?
Thomason knew that his fate was sealed during the American Eagle task, even though he wasn't fired for the mishaps there.
A: The American Eagle task. We were late for that interview because someone from American Eagle told our models to go home. When Carolyn saw me running around the street trying to hail any cab to send the models to their appointment, I saw a look on her face and I knew my fate was sealed at that point. Having said that, I knew as an unimpeachable fact that I would be fired when Tana and I found out we lost that task. Trump has the worst poker tell. When he splits the groups up (between the winners who get the reward and the losers) and says "where one of you will be fired," he glances at the person he is going to fire. I saw it with Erin, John, Angie, Bren, Chris and then with me. I knew for a fact, I was going to be fired. ... Nothing I could have said or done would have saved me.
Q: What business and leadership lessons did you learn through this experience?
A: If you act how you see people act in the boardroom in real life, you will be fired and you will have no friends and you will be a dismal failure. So what you see in the boardroom, you should do the opposite. If there is fault to be had, you should take ownership. And if there is praise to be received then you should give it to someone else.
The thing that is completely false in the Trump world is that you deny accountability. You deny and you counteraccuse and that is the worst thing you can ever do both in work and in your personal relationships.
Q: Your opinion of Trump's leadership skills?
A: He is very generous. He operates very clearly on motivating on fear and through money and praise. So if you do a good job he praises you. If you do a bad job, he says bad things to you. It's not my leadership style. I take more of an interest in the development of people that I am with other than the end goal. You can end up in the winner's circle but everyone around you is bloodied and dead and hates your guts. I think that is a weak leadership pattern. You will never find me running my business like Trump does. I think it is ineffectual and very short term.
Q: How did being an attorney help or hinder you in the competition?
A: People know how to argue more or less from their upbringing but the biggest thing being an attorney did was to prepare me to go into the boardroom and not take arguments personally.
Chris, Angie, Kristen and Erin were like wounded little birds. They felt they were decimated and portrayed so poorly and they're on this crusade to show how wonderful they are.
Q: What did you learn about being an entrepreneur from the show?
A: It's easy to get things started. People like Chris, he came from a very rich family. I came from a town without a single stoplight. I realized that everyone can succeed equally in this country. Sometimes it is just luck, but if you work hard and are diligent and persevere. I believe success will come your way.
Q: What do you think are the most important leadership characteristics?
A: Tana is a good leader because she is able to defuse hot situations and to affirm people. Kendra is a poor leader because she is interested in showing that she is right. She and Craig bicker non-stop. Craig is so easily controlled, if you just affirm what he is saying, restate it and then suggest a mutually beneficial goal. Tana will affirm when someone disagrees, state the best way to meet the goal and tell them -- let's move forward.
Q: What do you think Trump is looking for in an apprentice?
A: He is looking for someone who is just plain tough. You have to be hard. The reason why Stephanie got fired was not because she was delivering pizzas. She said the stupidest thing you could ever say to Mr. Trump. She said she wasn't used to working with someone rude and hard. He is looking for someone tough.
Q: Do you think Tana is polished?
A: Without a doubt. She has no equal in sales on the show. ... Kendra is a great marketer. Can you train somebody who isn't a leader to be a leader?
Q: Weigh in -- street or book smarts?
A: If you go to college you learn to be deferential, you learn to be winsome and genial. You don't learn how to interact with ideas unless you go to college. The biggest difference is those who don't go to college are not used to listening to other people speak. They are used to fighting it out to be heard.
Q: Does Chris have an anger management problem?
A: Chris has a pride problem. He said to me, "Mr. Trump said I was a crazy person. What should I do?" He asked me to mentor him. I told him we needed to open up the book of Proverbs and see how to speak in front of kings.
I said, "You are a fool. Every way that a fool does is right in your own eyes. Everybody else has a problem but you, and that is the reason why Trump said you were a crazy person. ... You think what you are doing is just fine but you don't realize how other people are perceiving it."
Chris said he needed to change, and we had Bible studies in the morning. He became much more coachable, but as time went on he became tired again and slipped back into those old patterns. ...
Q: Best advice for future "Apprentice" candidates?
A: Sleep whenever you can. Be prepared to work 2 1/2 days at a time with no sleep and be happy about it. When you lose, see that as an opportunity to have a one-on-one interview with Donald Trump. This is your real chance to shine and your one-on-one chance to play ball before the king.
Q: Do you think coming from a small town in Washington gave you any edge?
A: Without a doubt. I grew up in a small town where you ... value everyone the same. Nobody is better, and nobody is worse. When I met Trump, as far as I was concerned, he was just another guy.
ABOUT THE SERIES
What can real-world business leaders learn from the NBC series "The Apprentice"? That's the question the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posed to Maureen Moriarty, who uses the show as a teaching tool in her Bellevue Community College leadership course.
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