The Leader

From the starting gate it seems to me that there are a few Alpha Males who are competing for control of the group. Like it or not, the group will then not rise above that person's IQ because he's got the go/don't go say on every decision, and likely won't acknowledge anyone who doesn't act like an Alpha Male.

The women were gatherers from the beginning, but in my opinion a clear leader emerged. She was the one who read the letter to the group, and the one gathering ideas for a group name. When the woman who timidly suggested a name was appointed project manager, I was surprised. What a metric to use for making decisions! The rest of the show highlighted the conflict between the appointed leader and the natural leader.

When Life Gives You Lemons

Their first task was to sell lemonade. They all accepted this task on face value - buy supplies, choose a location and sell. I think they would have benefited from stopping to define their product and target audience, in the end they did this whether they wanted to or not.

The men ended up selling the novelty of a guy in a suit hustling lemonade. The women sold attention from attractive women. The lemonade was never the actual selling point, and they let the lemonade define them rather than defining the lemonade.

Rather than sending out 8 people to the exact same task, I would've split up into two groups. You don't need 8 people standing on a street corner selling lemonade, that's a waste of resources. 4 people selling lemonade would probably have comparable success to 8 people, so why not let the second group explore different options.

One group I would've sent to an active street corner, though I suspect this group would have a few things going against it.

1. Once you're on the street, you have a thousand options for beverages.
2. An untested lemonade from a paper cup - no matter how much someone tells me it's great does not really gaurantee satisfaction the way a Coke or Snapple will. Once the girls got on a roll, their public displays of affection demonstrated to the guys who saw them that they would get the same treatment - gauranteeing a payoff in advance of the sale.
3. Nobody in New York pays attention to someone who approaches them on the streets.
4. etc.

Establishing that one group would do the obvious allows everyone involved in the discussion to find an alternate strategy and get creative.

The second group I'd send door to door selling lemonade to offices. Of course, they're not selling lemonade, they're selling a distraction from work. "Hey, for a few dollars, I'll distract you from the tedium of your work for a few minutes, this is novel and interesting and something you'll remember for the rest of the day."

If one group was having more success than the other, I'd swap a few team members and adopt the strategy of the more successful group in both places, or allow the group that wasn't having much success to explore a 3rd strategy, though once we had a proven method, I would've stuck with it.

The Boardroom

I agree with Trump's decision. It makes more sense to take a chance on the guy who will do two much than on the one who won't do enough. The horse who runs fast but might sprain his ankle has a better chance of winning the race than the slow horse who won't sprain anything, especially when they're not the only two horses in the race.

One thing I noticed that Trump said was "you have to be an actor." Once you've decided on a script, you have to play the part, and you should play it to the best of your ability.

Throughout the process I noticed that Trump and his team were poker faced, while fear, disappointment, and happiness registered on the faces of everyone else at the table. Everyone would have a long way to go before they were ready to run a corporation.

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