A GTIM Baseline Change Proposal

Baseline Change Proposal[i]

Project: Advance PM Capability

Date: October 2025

Change Requestor: Michael Hatfield, PMP

Change No: GTIM-2025-1

Change Category:

Schedule:                                     Cost:                                 Scope:  X

Current Baseline Deficiencies:

I don’t know about the rest of GTIM Nation, but when I was in Business School the notion that the point of all management was to “maximize shareholder wealth” was taken as axiomatically true. This, of course, is nonsense, but it has led to a plethora of business model pathologies that have afflicted the management world for far too long. Not having direct access to most college-level business schools, I have no way of knowing this for certain, but I think it’s a good guess that this axiom is still being taught in a majority of management science classes.

It has been challenged often, if indirectly. Tom Peters leaps to mind, since his book In Search Of Excellence (Harper and Row, 1982) did challenge the notion, but somewhat tangentially, by pointing to organizations that realized success by embracing very different management narratives. In this blog I’ve often mocked the Asset Managers’ tale, and have provided several scenarios that (in my mind, anyway) directly overturn it, including the scenario of a hostile takeover. Consider that, in a hostile takeover, the acquiring company will seek to obtain a majority share of the target company’s stock, in order to drive it out of business, right? When this happens, the target company’s stock invariably jumps in price, while the acquiring company almost always has to borrow the funds for such an acquisition, exposing its stock prices to significant downward pressure. See where I’m going with this? If “maximizing shareholder wealth” was truly reliable, then no acquiring company would ever attempt a hostile takeover, and no targeted company would ever resist – and yet it happens all the time.

Then there’s the experience of new business owners. Are they focused on maximizing their profits? Not unless they’re doomed. The successful ones will concentrate (almost maniacally) on making their customers happy – a distinctively PM concept. They will spend their resources on meeting their customers’ expectations of quality, availability, and affordability, and not so much on the Return on Investment of their recently-purchased copier. Only after the entrepreneur has established something of a customer base will they turn their attention to monetizing their work – that is, if they want to stay in business.

And yet this axiom is taught, over and over, at some of the most prestigious business colleges in the world.

Describe the Change Being Proposed:

Project Management as a distinct discipline has been around for decades now, but it hasn’t really displaced the existing narrative that maximizing shareholder wealth is what underpins all of management science. I find this massively frustrating, and not just because I’m a bigole’ fan-boy of PM. I believe that the major reason for this has to do with the fact that Asset Management has served as the basis for governments collecting tax revenue since the time that corporations were first recognized, in the Middle Ages. Since then what we now know as Generally Accepted Business Practices has been gradually codified, and is currently firmly entrenched in the laws of nations around the world. PM? Not so much. PM’s capacity for broad acceptance has typically been rooted in the fact that embracing it provides a significant advantage for the acceptors over the rejectors, and not because failing to “do” PM will result in fines and potential jail time.

The change that’s needed – at the very least in academia, if not in business models everywhere – is a holistic recognition that the Asset Managers’ narrative driving most management science is profoundly flawed, and its more PM-savvy counterpart deserves a place at the table when such management science theories are being proposed and evaluated.

Reason for the Change:

Only 16.2% of Information Technology projects come in on-time, on-budget.[ii] Over 94% of Artificial Intelligence projects fail.[iii] If you think that IT or AI-associated Projects are particularly vulnerable to PM pathologies, fine. But 70% of all Projects fail to come in on-time, on-budget.[iv] And before GTIM Nation rushes to the comments section to remind me that a majority of new businesses fail because their Profit and Loss Statements indicate more of the latter than the former, I would like to point out that no (legally-operated) business has ever failed due to too many customers. From my point of view, the need for this BCP to be approved couldn’t be clearer: while the Asset Managers’ basic premise that “maximizing shareholder wealth” generally carries a lot of weight in academia and in much of the business world, the far more reliable “deliver scope on-time, on-budget” should absolutely displace it in the management science realm.

Approvals:

GTIM Nation: (Probably)

Academia: (Probably Not)

The Business World Writ Large: (?)