Wanna make it big? Forget hard work. Wow The Donald.

During last week's NBC première of "The Apprentice," Marty Kotis called an employee at home to ask if he was watching as 16 contestants began vying for a job with Donald Trump.

"No," he replied. "I'm not going to watch that junk."

"Turn it on," Mr. Kotis urged. "It's pretty good. Tell me who you would fire."

The next day, Kotis gathered his staff in Greensboro, N.C., and told them he was inspired by Mr. Trump's call to go "back to basics." In the reality show, that meant starting with $250 and selling lemonade on the streets of New York City. In Kotis's commercial real estate business, it meant developing the skills to turn leads into done deals.

"A lot of businesspeople are watching this because it's something they can relate to," he says. "They can laugh about it, but if you pick up one good idea from the show, it's like having your own free consultant."

Among the more than 18 million Americans who tuned in to the first of 15 episodes of the surprise hit - think Horatio Alger meets "Survivor" - were business founders, executives, and management professors intrigued by the whole idea of spotting entrepreneurial genius. And though they take it with a grain of salt (this is Hollywood, after all), many credit "The Apprentice" for serving up questions that pervade corporate America. When does it pay to be competitive? Does getting ahead depend on looks or luck instead of talent? The show also weighs whether formal education or the school of hard knocks is more valuable.

"Is it possible to be quite intelligent from an academic perspective but to be quite daft when it comes to practical intelligence or business intelligence?" asks Ben Dattner, a consultant who teaches industrial and organizational psychology at New York University. Employers always wonder how to "make a prediction about who's going to be successful."

The premise of the show is simple. Eight men and eight women - representing a wide range of self-starters from Ivy Leaguers and global managers to someone who skipped college - compete to become a president of one of Trump's companies. The winner gets a $250,000-a-year job. One by one, the rest get "fired."

Along the way, they are treated to Trump's secrets of success. And there's nothing subtle about how he defines success: Work hard, master the art of the deal, and you, too, may find yourself on top of the world. (Producer Mark Burnett of "Survivor" fame throws in plenty of swooping camera shots from Trump's helicopters, jets, and skyscrapers.)

But what's most intriguing to businesspeople is that instead of simply handing over résumés, the job candidates throw themselves into a series of made-for-TV business tasks. At the end of each episode, Trump takes the losing team into the boardroom (cue ominous music) to hash out people's strengths and weaknesses - and then decides who will take the dreaded elevator down.

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