So I just finished watching the first episode in the new Apprentice season.  I remember laughing at all the self-promotion jabs Trump got in in the first season, and just enjoying them as more humor than anything bording on serious.  I noticed in the new season they'll do these weird scenes where it cuts in on him talking to someone apparently important, and then telling them he had to go.  Is it just me or was this overly corny!?

The other thing I thought was weird is how the participants actually went about solving the problem.  The project managers don't seem like they could possibly be college graduates, much less MBAs.  Maybe they just cut out footage, but it looks like both teams jumped into brainstorming mode right away before thinking about what qualities success would entail.  They also had all nine people on their team brainstorming, even though some of them could have been doing market research or buttering up the designers that would later help them.  It didn't seem like there was any real foresight or project management here.

What impresses me most are the people who can recognize what might be called the "high order bit", which would be a point of leverage that will catupult you to a whole new level, far more than getting any one particular detail right on a task would.  There were a few people in the first season who really got this, and would recognize that they didn't need to just go through the motions, but rather figure out where they needed to end up and what would be most impressive in the end.  A good example of this was the team that advertised on their rich-shaw (sp?) cabs.  Or when Bill cornered the market on the VIP customers in the Taj espisode.

Anyway, hopefully this season will be as entertaining as the first.