Game Theory in Management

In last week’s blog I discussed the tactics employed by epic villains who take down their host organizations from their point of view. This week I’d like to explore how to counteract these villains, which requires a James Bond-like hero, just in the PM realm. You won’t need to wear a Rolex Submariner or Omega Seamaster, have a specific, signature alcoholic beverage, or drive an Aston-Martin. You will, however, need to amp up your managerial and observation skills, specifically in the following areas.

The first piece of advice I gave the epic villains was to not reveal their roles as villains, since such ones require subtlety and deceit in order to carry out their nefarious plans. Think (again) Richard from Richard III, or Iago from Othello. So, the first insight I can offer the Project Managers who seek to intercept these villains’ intentions is to learn to recognize them, the earlier the better. Your MI6 superiors will not be giving you an envelope with photos and biographical information about them, unfortunately. Know that learning this skill isn’t easy – even in Bond films most of the epic villains are originally presented as above-board industrialists.

Luckily, the Maccoby archetype of Jungle Fighter (see last week’s post) will invariably throw off some tells, or signs that they’re not on the project team to embrace and pursue the scope. These people are there to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others, and almost always at the expense of the overall project team’s interests. This being the case, Jungle Fighters will often display the following clues:

• In previous blog posts I’ve made a distinction between project personnel who seek primarily to attain the projects’ objectives, and only secondarily are concerned with what’s considered the proper process. I named these people “producers,” and contrasted them with “processors,” or those people who are more concerned with following an approved process than they are in actually attaining the projects’ goals. Jungle Fighters are rarely Producers, in my experience. In a simple process of elimination, it’s relatively safe to assume that your team’s Producers are either the Maccoby archetypes of Gamesmen or Craftsmen.
• Jungle Fighters are commonly the least educated/certified of the team, and are given to expressing a cynical attitude towards the value of post-graduate degrees, professional certifications, or peer-reviewed publications. Those things are hard to attain through calumny and deceit, meaning that they don’t come easily to the Jungle Fighter. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying that they are necessarily uneducated per se. There are plenty of Jungle Fighters in University faculty lounges everywhere. But, within a given organization, those employing Jungle Fighter tactics often do so because the legitimate ways of getting ahead are more difficult for them, meaning they lack comparative expertise.
• As the PM, train yourself to be highly observant of the interactions of your Project Team, particularly during the Storming Phase of the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing model, and especially at team meetings. Craftsmen and Company Men Maccoby archetypes will usually not be noticeably aggressive in their assertions, or in attempting to get their ideas or technical approaches adopted by the larger group. Gamesmen and Jungle Fighters will be, giving you another metric to eliminate more team members from the potential epic villain list.
• Another tell occurs when the Jungle Fighters do something that is borderline unprofessional, and just a little bit creepy. I once had a Team Leader approach my administrator behind my back and ask her for a copy of my daily calendar, under the auspices that he “needed to coordinate his appointments.” This was a lie – he simply wanted to know with whom I was meeting, and when, in order to better scheme his advancement at my expense. This particular admin was not only okay with it, she kept it hidden from me. I switched admins.

Once you have an idea of whom on your Project Team is a Jungle Fighter, what do you do about it? Several strategies can frustrate the Jungle Fighter, including:

• Do not allow any member of your team to discuss a third member with you without that person being present. So much of the Jungle Fighters’ effectiveness comes from the misunderstandings that naturally occur in Project Teams being amplified out of proportion, and ex parte conversations are a huge part of this misunderstanding amplification. Simply don’t allow it, and you deny the Jungle Fighters a key maneuver.
• Make it clear to the entire team that their comparative value to the organization is predicated on attainment of the project’s scope, and nothing else. Not time spent at the desk over a given number of hours, not how they are viewed by others, not how often they play golf with the org’s veeps – none of that. In those projects where I’ve seen the PM consistently place a heavy emphasis on the attainment of the scope, something remarkable happens. The Gamesmen will find common cause with the Craftsmen and begin working with them more closely. Next, any Company Men who can contribute will be engaged. But these producers will almost never voluntarily interact with the Jungle Fighters, seeing their participation activities as a waste of time.
• Reward your contributors in a timely fashion. This will not only lift Project Team morale, thereby engendering even better performance, it will also signal to the Jungle Fighters that they aren’t getting ahead without actually contributing. Frustrated, they will simply seek other Project Teams whose leaders don’t read ProjectManagement.com bloggers, and therefore remain vulnerable to their villainous schemes.

Know that employing these strategies will rarely – rarely – result in immediate payoffs. You’re taking a long-game approach to Project Team optimization, not saving the world in a fifteen-minute span of automatic gunfire, massive explosions, and epic villain comeuppance.

On the bright side, since your competition will not be reflexively driven to destroy your project’s capital equipment, you can expect to avoid tongue-lashings from Agent Q…

Having the reputation as ProjectManagement.com’s resident contrarian has its advantages. For example, as my colleagues address July’s theme of organizational culture by providing insights on how to improve it for greater efficiency and effectiveness, I am free to take the opposite angle: how to develop a strategy to diminish and eventually ruin that very culture.

GTIM nation knows I would do this just ‘cuz I can, but more recent readers might wonder why this is, in any sane PM universe, a valid topic. To these I ask, have you never read (or seen a production of) Shakespeare’s Othello, or Richard III? In these plays the villains Iago and Richard himself wreck devastation on the protagonists, and they do so for a reason: they seek to set up their own version of how things should be run, and the existing management/ruling structure, as virtuous as it is, is simply in the way. Oh, sure, they have multiple other nefarious motives, but those are not important for this analysis. The fact that they (and other, real-life actors like them) use specific tactics as a part of an overall strategy that very nearly worked to perfection is important for this analysis. So, practice twirling your Snidely Whiplash-style mustache and your Dr. Evil-style maniacal laughter, and let’s begin.

In 1965 Bruce Tuckman introduced the forming-storming-norming-performing model[i], asserting that newly-formed teams go through these stages as they grow to address the challenges before them. Additionally, Michael Maccoby’s book The Gamesman asserts that organizations tend to be populated by personnel who exhibit behaviors consistent with four different archetypes, the Company Man, the Craftsman, the Jungle Fighter, and the Gamesman (I discussed this at some length in my blog two weeks ago).  Considering these two models concurrently yields some very interesting insights on how to completely discombobulate an otherwise promising project team without having to actually tie anybody down onto railroad tracks.

Let’s start by taking Tuckman’s model at face value. Let’s also stipulate that, on any team with more than a dozen members, at least one Jungle Fighter is likely to be present. Luckily (for the Jungle Fighter, anyway) this person will not wear a sign, or offer any other obvious indicator that they intend to behave in a manner consistent with this archetype. After all, neither Richard III nor Iago had any grand reveal until after it was painfully obvious to the most casual observer that they were bad. What’s a Jungle Fighter to do in this situation? The obvious first step is to not reveal yourself to be a no-talent, conniving manipulator who gets ahead by having others oppose each other, all while taking credit for successes that you had little to do with and deflecting blame for your own mistakes.

Okay, check the “stealth mode” box on your list. What’s next? Based on Tuckman’s model, the next maturation step after the Project Team forms is to “storm.” At this point in the process the team will naturally encounter some level of churn as precise roles, responsibilities and authorities are defined, tried out, and redefined. This is the perfect environment for the Jungle Fighter to operate, but not just for their own advancement. No, the primary goal here is to elongate this phase as long as possible. The more distrust and confusion that can be introduced into the Project Team during this difficult phase the longer the effects of suspicion and a lack of clearly-defined roles and functions will last. The Gamesmen, with their characteristic willingness to take risks, will tend to become frustrated with the Craftsmen’s tendencies to strictly observe procedures in order to turn out a first-class product or service, while the Craftsmen will view the Gamesmen’s behavior as too avaunt-garde to realize the team’s optimal strategy. Take advantage of this natural rivalry by engaging in calumny in-between the two camps, stoking the fires of outrage by passing along the narrative that’s contrary to the archetypes you’re manipulating.

What about the Company Men? Their greatest fear is of being left behind, assigned a role that’s not only underappreciated, but considered to be out-and-out useless. The optimized Jungle Fighter can take advantage of this vulnerability in every instance where the project’s scope is poorly defined. The Company Men can be sent on all sorts of wild goose chases by implying the objective of any particular Work Package is some (believable) derivative of the actual, poorly-articulated scope. Their wasted time and frustration may not spill over into open conflict, but it certainly won’t help the Project Team move past the Storming phase.

Once the Project Team (finally!) moves past the Storming phase and into Norming, another opportunity will present itself. Even if open warfare has been subdued, you can count on a sense of lingering mistrust to remain in the background of the organizational culture. Each and every time a Craftsman addresses and accomplishes a part of the project’s scope, start a rumor (or even communicate directly) to that Craftsman that some part of the Gamesman coterie believes that it was delivered too slowly. It’ll drive them crazy. Conversely, whenever the Gamesmen begin to complete a Work Package, imply that it won’t pass quality control review. To avoid the embarrassment of being seen as a target of the Craftsmen, the Gamesmen will thoroughly review, if not completely re-do, the work that was about to be wrapped up. This will delay the beginning of the Performing cycle significantly.

What happens when the Project Team (finally!) achieves the Performing cycle? Is the Jungle Fighter now bereft of tactics? Absolutely not! Do what you can to influence the Team’s narrative, so that the actual achievers are not given credit for their accomplishments. Oh, sure, it’s a charge to have their successes attributed to the Jungle Fighters, but this is usually a difficult narrative change. It’s safer to have the successes attributed to nearby personnel, while transferring failures or errors to the real performers. Such mis-attribution, if done thoroughly enough, can actually push a Performing team all the way back to a Storming one!

After all of this Machiavellian skullduggery a bit of a caveat emptor is appropriate. Richard III is killed at the battle of Bosworth Field by the eventual Henry VII after being double-crossed by the Earl of Northumberland and Thomas, Lord Stanly, while Iago is led away to captivity and torture once his machinations, so cleverly hidden, come to light at the end of the play. Snidely Whiplash is accidentally shot and taken into custody in the 1999 film Dudley Do-Right, leaving Dr. Evil as the only master schemer/manipulator to escape a dreadful fate.

I’ll close with this little exchange from the 1999 film The Mummy[ii]:

Evelyn: You know, nasty little fellows such as yourself always get their comeuppance.

Beni: [laughing] Really? They do?

Evelyn: Oh, yes. Always.

[i] Wikipedia contributors. (2018, June 1). Tuckman's stages of group development. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:21, July 15, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development&oldid=843918688

[ii] Retrieved 18:45, July 16, 2018 from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120616/quotes

GTIM Nation is aware that one of my favorite targets for (wholly deserved, of course) criticism is the Asset Managers. It’s not personal, and I don’t do it out of spite. It’s just that what we know as double-entry bookkeeping can trace its origins back to the late 1400s Italy, and has largely become the basis for much of what passes for accepted management science today. Quick question: what other field of science is still predicated on 600-year-old theories? In a very real sense, the whole of Project Management can be seen as a revolutionary concept, and a direct challenge to the Asset Management paradigm. We PM-types disagree that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth,” preferring to focus on accomplishing set scope within pre-defined parameters of cost and schedule. We use different tools and methods to accomplish our aims, often to the chagrin of the nice folks in Finance and Accounting. In almost every single organization I’ve worked, there’s a kind of rivalry (if not out-and-out hostility) between the accountants and the Program Management Office, much of it stemming from this very divergency of management science world views.

In previous blogs I have taken the Asset Managers’ approach to resolving business problems to task on the grounds that their approaches aren't always valid. This lack of validity stems from a derivative of the old expression “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” I would paraphrase that to say “If you believe that the source and residence of all management information involving costs is the general ledger, then every problem that comes your way is going to present as needing a solution centered on ‘maximizing shareholder wealth.’” All of which serves to deliver us to the specific subject of this week’s blog, that of how this particular approach to management can influence organizational culture (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for July). I’ll start with a personal experience.

I was providing PM support to a certain department. This department had around two dozen people, and they were trying to implement a new software platform to handle the information streams they needed to do their jobs. I had come up with a schedule for all of the activities from their Work Breakdown Structure, including durations and schedule logic, and it became apparent that the overall project was going to experience a delay due to one particular activity on the critical path. This activity was being performed by a team of four people. I pointed out the likely delay and the responsible activity/team to the head of the department. It just happened to be on a Friday.

“Have the entire department work this weekend!” was his snap decision.

“Wait a second – your whole department doesn’t need to come in for the weekend. If you can just get this one team to put in the time it takes to wrap up this specific task…” I began.

“No, I want the entire department to come in. I can’t have this project come in late.”

And that was that.

I have often wondered since then what all of the non-critical-path activities’ team members did when they came in over that weekend, and if they had to cancel anything important to do so. Outside the four people on that one team, the others were very likely unable to do anything to help ensure speedier scope delivery, but the director was probably expecting them to at least look like they were doing so.

And what of the director himself? He was, no doubt, taught that the remedy to almost any managerial problem is to get more out of the existing assets, to maximize their “return.” Since these professionals were all on salary, the demand for more of their time carried with it no direct monetary costs. Sure, morale would take a hit, particularly when these professionals realized that their ruined weekends didn’t do a darn thing to help attain on-time milestone delivery. But so entrenched in this director’s mind that greater asset performance was the answer to this particular problem that, even when shown that his was the wrong response, he would not abandon it. This inflexible, highly formulaic approach is common fare among most University’s business schools, and I think it’s a shame.

And yet this is a rather common way that the mindset that the general ledger is the ultimate yardstick for evaluating various management strategies or problem-solving tactics manifests in organizational cultures everywhere. Do you have it in your organization, or are you even an initiator of it? A simple mental exercise can answer that question.

Imagine coming across a singularly difficult problem in the middle of a project. I’ll use the analogy of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. You and your team have done everything you can think of to overcome this problem, but have not succeeded. Suddenly a consultant arrives, and proposes that she can overcome the difficulty – guaranteed – and you propose a price. She solves the problem, but does so in a way that requires minimum effort and time. Essentially, she makes the solution look exceptionally easy, especially in light of your teams’ failed efforts. Here’s the question:  Are you resentful that it was so easy for her, or are you completely okay with it, and happy to pay her the agreed price?

The Asset Manager is more likely, by training, to take the earlier stance, the PM to take the latter. We have Grimm’s fairy tales telling us of the potentially bad consequences of the former, but none on the latter. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s an illustration of the mindset that dramatically increased efforts are always needed for improved performance, and the undesirable consequences of that mindset.

If you are in an organizational culture beset by this mindset, you have probably already observed some of the following manifestations:

• Your value as an employee is at least somewhat predicated on how much time you are actually at work, and at your desk,
• …but not on how much you actually accomplish. In fact, if you accomplish a significant amount, but appear to do so easily, it’s often counted against your perceived worth.
• Cheerfulness at work is also considered a negative, since it indicates a cavalier attitude towards shouldering your part of the team’s burden.

Don’t misunderstand – by no means am I asserting that all organizations headed by Asset Managers are poorly led, or prone to less-than-optimal, formulaic solutions. After all, many of these managers went on to get their PMP®s…

As most of GTIM nation knows, my third book as well as the webinar I did with the help of ProjectManagement.com involves significant research in the area of ProjectManagement.com’s July theme of Organizational Culture (and, no, I did not bribe Cameron to set this particular theme). In going back over my notes, a couple of things popped that I hold to be rather fascinating about this topic, so I’d like to pass them along.

First off, I’d like to give a call-out to Michael Maccoby’s book The Gamesman (Simon and Schuster, 1977), which I’ve referenced often and will, no doubt, refer to in the future. To take a hydraulic press and metaphorically condense his main point, Dr. Maccoby asserted that there are four types of workers in a given organization:

• The Craftsman doesn’t really care for whom he works, but cares deeply about the output.
• The Company Man tends to take on the persona of the group or team around him.
• The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through calumny and deceit.
• The Gamesman doesn’t see his salary as a roof over his head or food on the table. Rather, he sees it (and other perks) as tokens in some immense game he’s playing. Because of this approach, the Gamesman is both far more likely to master the finer points of the industry he’s participating in, and is more willing to take risks. Generally speaking, this combination tends to make this archetype more successful than the others.

Interestingly enough, psychologist Richard Bartle performed an analysis of people who play massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG), and also proposed (wouldn’t you just know it?) a four-tier archetypal pattern of those players. Bartle named his categories after the suits in a deck of cards, so:

• Hearts are those people who play in order to socialize and interact with other players.
• Spades are the explorers of the virtual worlds, digging around to find things of interest or value.
• Diamonds tend to perform the game’s stated objectives or scripted adventures, and reap the rewards for doing so.
• Clubs are there to fight.

And, of course, for those of my readers who have had their Meyers-Briggs type assessed, you are aware that they also use a four-axis evaluation method to determine your type. With all of these people who are way smarter than I am using structures based on four archetypes, who am I to differ?

In order to even address the topic of organizational culture intelligently, we must come up with some sort of basis to actually quantify it. Recall the axiom that that which cannot be measured cannot be managed. I’m going to base my four-tiered architecture on Dr. Maccoby’s assertions, and simply expand them. Here’s my thinking: if Dr. Maccoby is largely right (and I think he is), it stands to reason that organizations comprised of Craftsmen, Jungle Fighters, Company Men, and Gamesmen will tend to take on the aspects of which category holds the most personnel. For example,

• If the organization is dominated by Craftsmen, it will tend to turn out high-quality goods and services, but is vulnerable to being outperformed in market share to organizations that use newer technology to approach such Craftsmen’s quality but at lower prices.
• The organization with a plurality of Jungle Fighters will expend more energy than others harming their competition, the most obvious example being those companies that spend money on politicians willing to pass laws or regulations that raise barriers to entry in a given industry. Another sure-fire tell that you’re working for a bunch of Jungle Fighters is that the organization values loyalty above competence or even success. Craftsmen or Gamesmen trapped in such a situation will see their insightful, sincerely advanced recommendations that just happen to have even the mildest of contradicting-the-status-quo aspects viewed as treachery, or rebellion.
• Gamesmen-dominated companies are extremely dynamic and versatile, and are probably more likely to succeed, especially in newer industries. They are also more likely to fail spectacularly.

“Wait!” I can hear GTIM Nation say, “What about organizations controlled by …”  Then I hear the voices trail off as everybody realizes that Company Men can’t, by definition, dominate an organization, as they tend to assume the persona of the team around them. If you believe that your company’s CEO is, in fact, a Company Man, it simply means that there is a power behind that throne, another person (or persons) making the key decisions that are passed through such a one. And those people are absolutely not Company Men.

So, now that we have a guide to types of Organizational Cultures, what are the major implications? For starters, keep in mind that it’s entirely possible that a plurality (or even majority) of the organizations within a given industry can exhibit the same macro-culture. Easy examples include technology and dot.com orgs, which are notorious for being headed by unconventional, innovative thinkers, i.e., Gamesmen. Commodities-based companies, such as grocery stores or automobile service stations, are notable for quickly eliminating non-Craftsmen, since low quality goods or services for a given cost can’t survive much competition. Jungle Fighter-led organizations can only flourish in areas where performance is subjective, even speculative, such as media companies and political action committees.

I believe that most project-oriented orgs can and do allow for widely varied mixes of the four archetypes, making generalizations about them difficult. However, I think it’s fairly safe to say that

• Gamesmen get the projects in the door,
• Craftsmen deliver the scope on-time, on-budget (implication: most PMs will gravitate towards this archetype),
• Company Men will mirror the behavior of whichever of the above two types are most prevalent or influential, and
• Jungle Fighters will attempt to take credit for others’ successes, and deflect responsibility for their own failures. To whatever extent the said organization adheres to a meritocratic structure will directly influence how successful and common this type becomes. (Proof: the United States Chess Federation is virtually pure meritocracy, and Jungle Fighter tactics are utterly useless there.)

As for useful tactics in surviving in these environs, I can provide, with a high level of confidence, the following guidance…

Oooops! I ran out of blog pixel ink. Tune in next week, to further the discussion on My Organization Has A Culture. Now What?

Continuing with ProjectManagement.com’s June theme of technology, I feel the need to stick with my contrarian position, since most of the time advances in technology, be it in materials science, construction methods, or information systems are met with enthusiastic acceptance. However, if the large volume of horror-laced science fiction films and novels have taught us anything, it’s that carelessly or recklessly advanced technology can have terrifying outcomes. While careless or reckless advances in Project Management technology probably won’t threaten mass extinctions or the entire population of the Earth becoming enslaved to supercomputers and their robot minions, PM advances do carry the threat of being soul-crushingly boring and terrifyingly irksome. To paraphrase Kyle Reese, “Listen. Understand. Those technology-enhanced PM experts are out there. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with...they don't feel pity or remorse or fear...and they absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you do PM the way they want.”

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

“But Michael!” I can hear GTIM Nation exclaim, “What possible nightmare scenarios can come about from advances in PM technology?” Well, I can imagine a few, including:

• Absurdly tight and mis-applied Variance Analysis Thresholds.  As commercial off-the-shelf Critical Path and Earned Value Methodology software platforms become more capable of sharing data with other systems such as the general ledger, the dopey analysis of comparing budgets to actual costs at the line-item level will become easier to do. The whole point of a Variance Analysis Threshold (VAT) is to acknowledge that some noise exists in the raw project performance data, and to avoid raising an alarm when, in fact, no performance issue is occurring. For example, a typical research Work Package (WP) will have the following weighted milestones:
  • 15% done when the initial investigation/data pull is complete.
  • 40% of the budget is claimed when the first draft of the findings report is done.
  • 65% has been attained when the second draft of the findings report is complete.
  • 85% claimed when the report is shipped off to the customer, and
  • 100% of the budget is claimed as earned when the customer approves the report.

How did I know that the completion of the second draft was worth precisely 65%? I didn’t. It’s just an approximation that tends to reflect actual performance on these kinds of WPs. What if the exact percentage were to be 59.4, in this specific instance? Well, it’s okay, since there are no VATs set as low as 5.4% (not by adults, anyway). The system is set up to acknowledge a certain amount of imprecision in EVM and CPM performance assessment claims, and compensates for them. But not if this compare-actuals-to-budget business keeps going, no siree! The technology will allow for immediate and accurate appraisals of each and every instance, not of a Cost Variance, but of a spend variance, which is very different and very irrelevant. Before you know it, the PMs will have to fill out Variance Analysis Reports on why they bought a bottle of Dr. Pepper when the spend plan clearly called for a can of Coca-Cola. For those who think I’m exaggerating, keep your ears open during your next project review. Yeah, I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

• The Time-Phased Estimate to Complete.  This particular piece of analytical technology is truly pushing the envelope of management science irrelevance. As I’ve often noted in previous blogs, the Estimate at Completion (EAC) is an extremely valuable piece of project performance information, but it’s easy to accurately calculate. Unable to accept this information gem at face value, many self-identified experts call for a bottoms-up estimate of the remaining project work, an Estimate to Complete, to be created, and performance measured against it. This turns the original baseline to rubber, and had been previously considered a practice pathology to be avoided. What happens to the original baseline once a bottoms-up ETC has been produced? Surely the ETC has incorporated more recent data and circumstances that could not have been foreseen at the project’s start, so we should go with the ETC, right? But if the original baseline ought not to be turned to rubber, why do the ETC in the first place? Simply because advances in PM information system technology allows for the generation of these time-phased ETCs? If that’s the case, then what happens next month, when the system delivers another time-phased ETC? Will it be used instead of last month’s ETC, or even the original baseline? What about the ETC after that? Before you know it, the Project Office will be hip-deep in rubber baselines, with their adherents bickering about whose should be considered more accurate or authoritative.
• Broader Risk Management Plans. As the technology allows more excessive cross-hatching of basic project budget, earned, and actual costs data, risk management software will have a field day with its enhanced ability to slather irrelevant Gaussian curve-based comparisons onto the real performance data. The most insipid weapon here is the “I told you so” bomb, which works like this: the risk analysis delivers a stochastic range of bad things that might happen to which activities within the baseline. If any of those things actually happen, the risk managers will be in a position to say “See, I told you so!”, providing a veneer of legitimacy to their entirely irksome approach. Those impacted by the blast, heat, and shock of the I Told You So Bomb won’t even know it until after the unfortunate occurrence risk event actually happened, and the risk managers come along afterwards and say … (you know).

Yes, science fiction is full of horror stories of technology gone wrong, and the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence make it easy to imagine terrifying outcomes. But PM isn’t all that different. Imagine a younger Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to your project review, his glowing red killer robot eyes obscured behind sunglasses, saying in his German accent and droll delivery style “You spent $105.40 on a part that appears in your basis of estimate as costing $100. Hasta la vista, baby!”

Also, just by the way, The Terminator came back in time from 2029, which is only 10 ½ years away.