Key Career Development Insight: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

The Latin part of this blog’s title, roughly, if you want peace, prepare for war, is attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus[i], though even George Washington used a derivative of it during his first address to a joint session of Congress, in 1790.[ii] My interpretation: if one desires their country to be at peace, then that country had better be prepared to defend that peace. What does all of this have to do with career development within the PM realm (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for January), GTIM Nation may ask? Well, I’ll tell you.
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
I have to believe that the point of developing one’s career – particularly within the management sciences – is to get to a place where your mastery of the techniques and philosophies of management can be appropriately (if not excessively) monetized, for the economic security of yourself and your loved ones, sure, but also to have left a contribution to the advancement of said management sciences (which, if we’re being frank, is measured by its economic success). Okay, fine, but how do we get there? To paraphrase the Latin part of the title, if you want to be a leader within PM, first become an excellent servant.
I once worked with a colleague – I’ll call him Dan – who had two particularly interesting interactions that are very illustrative. The company we worked for was medium-sized, but had encountered a sudden growth spurt, and had to convert its main conference room into a cubicle farm. These cubes were tiny, too, and Dan had been assigned to one. One morning a young woman arrived to move in to the cubicle across from Dan. She was the daughter of the company’s new Chief Executive Officer, freshly graduated from college with a business degree. As they got to know each other, as Dan would later tell me, it became obvious that this young lady had very high expectations of her career path, indeed. She was, in fact, appalled at both her office conditions as well as her relative placement within the organization. Keep in mind she had just graduated. She showed little knowledge of the company’s primary technical capabilities, its business practices or techniques, nor did she seem inclined to learn them. Her sense of entitlement was not just annoying, it was positively blinding her to the path that she would need to recognize and ultimately embrace – that her (corporate) worth had little to do with her degree or lineage, and more to do with her ability to provide a service to others. That would, in the long term, determine whether or not some PM would be willing to bring her onto the Project Team as they pursued the scope in front of them. Sure, her father being the CEO would, umm, encourage some PMs to give her a charge code; but, should she fail to deliver anything other than diatribes on how everyone else was getting it wrong (i.e., disagreed with her professors), even these would eventually seek to distance themselves from her.
I ended up moving on from this particular nepotism-addled company before Dan did, and had actually lost contact with him when, some years later, I was surprised to receive a phone call from him. He had moved on to some type of utility company that had hired Dan to set up their brand-new Project Management Office. Unfortunately, his “honeymoon” period had come to an abrupt end. Apparently the executive who had hired him had a level of enthusiasm for PM that was not shared by the others in the management team, making even the simplest of implementation attempts insanely difficult, if not impossible. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was wound up pretty tight, too.
“You need to provide an information stream that’s indispensable to the anti-PM crowd.”
“Thanks, Captain Obvious. How exactly can I do that? They won’t even consider creating a Work Breakdown Structure!”
While I was pretty good at setting up critical PM-based information streams, I had never done it under conditions analogous to an organizational behavior and performance emergency room. I don’t remember precisely what I told him at that time. In retrospect, I should have advised the following tactics:
·Pull some targeted projects’ total budget from the general ledger.
·Get access to their cumulative actual costs by month.
·Find a way to pull an estimate of their percent complete, also by month.
·Create an Estimate at Completion for each project by dividing the cumulative actuals by the percent complete.
·Create a histogram that compares the Budget at Completion and the EAC, and sort it in order of largest negative Variance at Completion to largest positive.
·Send this report to the exec who initiated the PMO in the first place, but also to those opposed to it.
The point here is to resist the temptation to criticize or scold the organizational opposition, even in extreme anti-PM environs, and instead become a valuable servant, providing timely, accurate, and relevant management information to information-starved decision makers. Become an indispensable servant, and your journey towards a fully-developed career is far more likely to be successful. Or, Si dux esse vis, servus fias.[iii]


[i] Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum on January 26, 2026, at 19:11 MST.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Retrieved from https://lingvanex.com/translation/english-to-latin on January 29, 2026, at 19:26 MST.