LETTER TO THE EDITOR
15 August 2026
Dear David and Subscribers
On 14 August, 2026, I happened to listen to a two-minute response to a question from a reporter on “Lessons Learned” to General John Caine “Raisin’ Cain”, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his Pentagon Live Briefing, 14 August, 2026- from minute 45:05 to 47:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjClq9ipU.
It so impressed me that it is worth publishing it as presented to serve as advice from a PRACTITIONER with 55 years of experience as both an OWNER and as a CONTRACTOR where my own money has been, is now and will probably remain in the future, to be based on SUCCESSFUL “initiation, planning, executing, controlling and closing” projects as the “delivery system of choice” to “create, acquire, update, expand, maintain, repair, replace and eventually dispose of ORGANIZATIONAL ASSETS”, his advice has been EXACTLY the same FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH that I have been passing along to my student/clients for the past 32+ years.
“I do want to talk about how I think about this and how we think about it. Uh, and this is something that I’m pretty passionate about. I believe the joint force has to be a very fast-learning organization early, often, and always. Um, and in each case, at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, we’ve charged the joint force to look at itself and ask, “What was our plan?” Well, first, did we have a plan? Yes or no? The answer is always yes because we plan for literally everything. Did we execute our plan? Yes or no? If we did, did it work? If not, why not? If we didn’t execute our plan, but did something better, what’s the lesson learned associated with that? Then how do we quickly capture those lessons after every loss or engagement, adopt them, and share them across the entire joint force? And inside the Joint Staff, we’ve tasked our J7 directorate, led by General Lieutenant General Lzooski, a United States Marine, to be extremely entrepreneurial in harvesting and capturing those lessons proactively, not reactively. In fact, we’ve got teammates from the J7 who are now spread out across the SenCom Theater, both here in the States and forward to ensure that in every opportunity we do not miss a chance to grab that lesson and quickly accelerate it into the practice that we adopt inside the joint force so that if there’s a loss or if there’s something that we can learn from that we learn it not only in the SENCOM AO but we adapt it across all of the combatant command. Not just into paycom, uh, and it’s across all of the war-fighting functions. I’ve asked them to look rigorously, to check our egos at the door, to remember this is about what’s right, not who’s right, and to be clinical in how we look at lessons learned because we owe it to the force to do that. Thanks for that question.”[1]
With 32+ years in the COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT and ASSESSMENT business, and literally HUNDREDS of papers from my graduates featured in the PMWJ over the past 15 years, I want to emphasize that project management is a broken system. The research published by KPMG/AIPM is just one of many studies showing project management is failing us.
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTHS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT “SUCCESS.”
More…
To read entire Letter to the Editor, click here
How to cite this work: Giammalvo, P. D. (2026). Presentation By General John Caiine “Raisin’ Caine”, Letter to the Editor, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/pmwj168-Sep2026-Giammalvo-on-General-John-Caines-14-August-Video.pdf
[1] General John Caine “Raisin’ Cain”, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his Pentagon Live Briefing, 14 August, 2026- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjClq9ipU from minute 45:05 to 47:10.
