"You may fire when you are ready, Gridley."

Admiral George Dewey
May 1, 1898

"This undertaking will without doubt be the most significant contribution of your entire project," the newcomer announced at the staff meeting the morning following the cancellation of the world's first invisible airplane project. It was soon learned that this individual had been assigned to exhume the remains of the effort and to determine what had gone wrong so that it could absolutely never, ever, happen again. The speaker was obviously well qualified, having never had his own professional reputation besmirched with the types of problem that had plagued the project whose entrails he was now to examine. There were, of course, those few malcontents in the back of the room who in this case mumbled something about the speaker having never been involved in any project, but even they were soon silenced by the enthusiasm which built up for the undertaking when the buses from headquarters arrived. The two least credible sentences in the English language have been said to be "The check is in the mail" and "I'm from headquarters and I'm here to help you." Soon, the headquarters staff was careening throughout the organization, spreading death and destruction wherever it alighted. The effort to pin blame began to gain such momentum, expedited enormously by the fact that several formerly key members of the project were now off selling real estate, that virtually everyone eagerly joined the fray. Hindsight is the world's most exact science.