Lessons Learned

This episode showed that teams that cooperate outperform teams that bicker.

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• Shake it off. You botched something last week? Don't let it drag you down. Be aggressive and make every day a new beginning. When Felisha and Rebecca seized the project-manager positions on their teams this week, they showed a hunger to "step up" and compensate for their weak performance in previous tasks.
   

• Hold your fire. As Alla and Felisha descended into a power struggle, producing a great video became a secondary concern. A negative agenda took over and brought them down. The day before a big project is due is a stupid time to start shooting down your partner.
   

• Listen to experts. When time is tight and you lack the expertise, specialists can save you. When their video producer told Alla and Felisha that they had filmed far too much footage for a 60-second video, they kept trying to cram in as much content as possible. The result? A chaotic video that lost.
   

• Toss it. If the clock is ticking and your brilliant concept is fizzling fast, scrap it before it brings you down.  When Randal and Rebecca decided to fire the actor they had hired and have Randal star in their video instead, their on-the-spot decision saved them from disaster. A great call.
   

• Let other people shine. When you allow your colleagues to look like stars, you look even better. When Randal allowed Rebecca to be project manager at this intense stage of the competition, he showed his ability to be a selfless colleague, and reaffirmed his position as one of the strongest of all the candidates this season. The result? They both stayed centered on the process of producing a great video and scored a critical win. Compare Randal to Alla, who tried claw her way over Rebecca's back. Are negative politics more effective than positive politics? You decide.
   

• Don't hire negative players. Keeping the wrong people out of your organization is more efficient than trying to improve them after they are on the payroll. When Trump fired Alla because she was too difficult to manage, both Bill and Caroline said it was the right call; neither of them wanted her on the Trump team. Would you want her on yours?
   

• Connect with the customer: Excel's video was much more successful than Capital Edge's because it connected with the potential customer for Microsoft. The reason why people buy software products is so that they can be more productive. By showing the problems that businesspeople can have and how Microsoft can solve them, Excel caused viewers of its video to think, "Sure - I can relate to that."
  
  The bottom line: Capital Edge's presentation contained more information than Excel's, but there was no lingering effect of that information on the customer. It was simply too much, too fast, with nothing to hold the viewer's attention. When in doubt, it's often better to present less information, giving the viewer more time to process the main key points. The most important things to emphasize answer the question, "Why should I buy this product."