Things working against you

Sometime ago I was watching The Apprentice Africa (TAA) (it’s a show that gathered 18 contestants from across Africa who compete for a favorable corporate job complete with perks, training and what not) and I felt sorry for Nancy Kalembe, one of Uganda’s representatives on the show. This by the way was the episode thingy in which she was fired.

Apparently you are always advised to make presentations as if you are presenting concepts to people who have no idea about the subject matter. This can be a daunting task and a bit tricky because you have to be careful about deciding how “dumb” your audience is.

The task that got Nancy fired concerned them selling Nigeria to the world, I think, so it involved a lot of strategy in form of media and other marketing strategy. As fate would have it, Nancy was the leader of the said task so basically her word was law and as if fate had one more trick under its sleeve, it place one Eunice Omole in her path.

Now as far as I know, Nancy understands advertising and marketing concepts, her team mates of the other hand were not as averse so this presented problems right from the get go.

When you (practicing media person) ask questions like “who is the audience” continuously it’s not because you don’t know your target, its more to refocus discussions. Her team mates interpreted this to mean she was not focusing on the task at hand and was irresponsible and an inept leader.

I felt sorry for poor Nancy because I could understand where she was coming from. At that point, she had been up for possible eviction about five times and you could clearly see the fight had gone out of her. She looked like she had reached her peak and did not give a hoot… I don’t blame her.