Episode Overview
Recorded live at the AACE International Houston Gulf Coast Section symposium (lunch on the tables at the University of Houston, roughly 200 people in the room, and the show's first-ever livestream), this episode puts four presidents of AACE International on one stage: Michael Nosbisch (2011–12), Martin Darley (2014–15), Chris Caddell (2020–21) and 2025-2026 president Michael Bennink. Orion moderates a fast hour through accidental career origins, the soft skills that separate analysts from advisors, AI, remote work, global project controls and what it's actually like to lead a volunteer association. The through-line: technical skill gets you into project controls; credentials, soft skills and contribution are what turn technical experts into industry leaders.
Careers start by accident. Leadership doesn't
All four presidents fell into project controls sideways. What moved them up was deliberate: get certified, learn to influence, make recommendations, and give time back to the profession.
Four presidents, one stage
From the classroom (Texas A&M) to the courtroom (expert witness work) to Chevron's capital portfolio: over 150 years of combined project-controls experience, as Orion introduces them.
Live from Houston
The seventh annual AACE Houston Gulf Coast Section symposium, hosted at the University of Houston and sponsored at lunch by LK Davis Consulting, with students in the room who'll be running these projects in ten years.
Quotes are transcribed from the live session and lightly condensed for readability (false starts and fillers removed, meaning untouched). The published cut opens at Orion's welcome, so all timestamps are rebased to that welcome (0:00) and are approximate. Panelist bios come from the episode's published writeup and the on-stage introductions; nothing here is attributed that wasn't said on the record or published publicly. Speaker labels in the machine transcript were partly generic and have been reconciled by content, so the talk-split figures are approximate. Numbers cited from memory on stage (the "150+ combined years," the 6,000-member count, Martin's 1% benchmarking line) are directional, not audited.
This live session also went out on the feed a second time: on May 15, 2026 it was re-released as "150+ Years of Project Controls Wisdom: Lessons from Four AACE Presidents". Same recording, same panel, new title. This brief treats the original Mar 25, 2026 release and its episode 012 numbering as canonical.
Inside the Episode
The session as it actually unfolded: a welcome and four introductions, five audience-flavored topics, and a lightning round when the Q&A mic stayed quiet. The strip maps each segment's share of the 54 minutes; click any block to jump to its chapter. Timestamps are approximate.
"What we have is four presidents, a live stream, 200 people eating lunch, and one moderator who was specifically warned on the prep call, and I quote, 'good luck controlling this bunch.'"
The planned 10-minute audience Q&A became a lightning round: the crowd stayed quiet, so Orion asked the question himself.
Welcome & Four Introductions
Thank-yous to the section, the university and the sponsor, then four presidential introductions with receipts.
Snakes & Ladders: How They Landed Here
A failed rock guitarist, an "accidental profession," a paper someone was suckered into: four origin stories.
The Next Generation & Soft Skills
An audience question kicks off the case for case studies, credentials "in the bank," and reports that answer "so what?"
AI: Excited or Terrified?
Punch cards to LLMs: why the panel reads AI as the enabler they've waited whole careers for, with humans still deciding.
The Remote-Work Debate
Robotic dogs, drone site tours, "not your parents' remoteness", and the career you can't manage from a bedroom.
Project Controls Around the World
Global standards, cultural nuance, geopolitics, road warriors, and a trailer on a Greek island.
The Big Chair: Leading AACE
What surprised them about the presidency: volunteer bandwidth, continuity, and users versus contributors.
Lightning Round & Close
Advice to their 25-year-old selves: a Marine, a train wreck, a question-asker and a man in a hurry.
Who carried the mic
Computed from the session transcript by word count; the machine transcript's speaker labels were reconciled by content, so treat the split as approximate. The panel carried ~80% of the conversation, exactly what a moderator wants.
The Panel · Four Presidents of AACE International
Four people who have each held the top volunteer job in the cost-engineering profession's global association, introduced here in the order Orion brings them on stage. They speak in personal capacities, not for their employers.
Who they are, in a paragraph each
Michael Nosbisch · the professor
Over 37 years in project management and controls across government and private sectors: EPC years at URS, Jacobs Engineering, Kiewit and Parsons, the consulting side from 2009, and today Director of Project Controls Consulting Services at Strategic Management Solutions (SMSI). A US Marine Corps infantry officer before any of it, he lectured at USC for 22 years and is now a visiting senior lecturer at Texas A&M (introduced on stage as a visiting professor), teaching a graduate course in construction accounting and financial management, which he deliberately bends toward forward-looking cost engineering, taught through real GAO audit case studies. An AACE member for more than 20 years and a Fellow since 2014, he was president of AACE from 2011 to 2012, giving him the longest view on the stage.
"Project controls is kind of the accidental profession: you get introduced to scheduling, estimating, cost management or risk management… and that accidentally becomes the focus of your career."Michael Nosbisch · ~7:55
Martin Darley · the straight talker
A Brit adopted by the energy capital of the world: a chartered quantity surveyor with over 40 years in the energy sector, a Fellow of both RICS and AACE (a rare combination) and a Certified Cost Professional. Most recently he was Senior Advisor, Estimating at Chevron (2020–2025), where he provided strategic guidance and cost estimates for capital projects including a $7 billion FPSO, the last in a line of Chevron roles that began in 2011: Project Control Manager, then Cost Engineering & Project Services Manager, then Team Lead Opportunity Services. Before Chevron: nine years as a Director at Turner & Townsend and nine as Operations Director at Faithful+Gould. President of AACE 2014–2015, then the board's VP Education 2016–2018. Reputation, per Orion's intro: says exactly what he thinks.
"Get qualified, get certified, just get it in the bank. It's your own credential and you carry it with you. Go international with letters behind your name, and people start listening."Martin Darley · ~13:45
Chris Caddell · the expert witness
Co-Director of Dispute Resolution at Spire Consulting Group in Houston, with 38 years of project-management experience across oil & gas, infrastructure, manufacturing and life sciences, all over the world. He drew the toughest hand in AACE history: president-elect in 2019, presiding through COVID in 2020–21. A registered PE in Texas, Fellow of AACE, holder of CCP, DRMP and PMP certifications, he is a Rice civil engineer with a McCombs MBA who spent 14 years as a Principal at PMA Consultants and 11 at Turner & Townsend, rising to Senior Vice President in its Houston office, before joining Spire in 2021. These days he's mostly an expert witness in construction disputes: he's seen every way a project can go wrong, and been paid to explain why.
"What you get out of this association as a contributor is exponential over just being a user."Chris Caddell · ~46:45
Michael Bennink · the sitting president
Managing Director at J.S. Held, based in Red Bank, New Jersey, specializing in construction disputes and claims: performance, management and forensic schedule analyses. His matters span oil & gas facilities, power plants, transportation infrastructure and petrochemical plants. A Rensselaer mechanical engineer with a Monmouth MBA, he spent nine years engineering gas transmission, distribution and LNG operations at New Jersey Natural Gas, then 18 years of construction claims consulting at The Nielsen-Wurster Group, Deloitte and Marsh, where he was a Senior Vice President for a decade, before joining J.S. Held in 2019. He also served 12 years as AACE's New Jersey Section president before climbing the international board. As the only sitting president on the panel (a term that ran July 2025 to July 2026; he has since rotated to Past-President on the 2026–2027 board), he's the one who still has to be careful: the other three can say whatever they want.
"AI is gonna be disruptive, but it's also gonna be an opportunity."Michael Bennink · ~19:25
The room
- Event
- AACE International Houston Gulf Coast Section symposium, the seventh year of the event, per Orion's intro.
- Venue
- University of Houston: "a building full of people who are gonna be running these projects in 10 years."
- Format
- Lunch panel, ~200 people in the room, sponsored by LK Davis Consulting, and the show's first-ever livestream.
The association
- AACE Int'l
- AACE International: the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering, "6,000-plus members" as Orion cites on stage (directional).
- Standards
- Its recommended practices are embedded globally in how owners and EPCs run cost and schedule: "if people aren't aware of it, they're still doing it," says Martin.
- Credentials
- AACE certifications (CCP, PSP, DRMP, EVP and more): the "get it in the bank" credentials the panel keeps returning to.
The Host · Orion Matthews
Orion is an award-winning programmer, entrepreneur and technology executive who has spent the last decade in the engine room of major capital projects. He founded Queryon in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a focus on data analytics and software for the construction industry, starting with bellwether client BP, whose project-controls solutions his team deployed globally, from the North Sea to Azerbaijan to Houston. Today he's a recognized expert in PMO data analytics and project-controls reporting, serving billion-dollar portfolios for owners including BP, Santos, Balfour Beatty and Turner & Townsend, a regular speaker at major industry conferences on AI and analytics in capital projects, and the host of this show.
Why this pairing works
- The moderator's seat
- This is the show's first live session: one moderator, four presidents, and a prep-call warning of "good luck controlling this bunch." Orion keeps a five-topic hour moving and still lands a lightning round.
- Shared turf
- Orion builds the project-controls reporting billion-dollar portfolios run on, and the panel spends much of the hour on exactly that craft: reports that answer "so what?", AI as the enabler, and analysts willing to make a recommendation.
Beyond the PMO
- The builder's arc
- Founded Introspect Software out of high school; built and sold Design-PT (acquired 2015). His software has run from McMurdo Station to aircraft carriers, with write-ups in Scientific American, CNN and Maxim, and a BP Helios Award.
Snakes & Ladders: Four Accidental Careers
Orion opens with a line Martin gave him on the prep call (a cost-engineering career is a bit like snakes and ladders; you don't always know where you're going to land) and asks each president how they got here, "and whose fault was it?" Nobody on this stage planned to be here. That turns out to be the point.
"I wanted to be a rock guitarist like Ritchie Blackmore, but apparently my fingers and brain don't work like his, so I had to get a job… That was the only time I've ever been interviewed for a job, so it's a good career."Martin Darley · ~5:15
- Martin, 18, applies for a trainee quantity-surveyor job, admits at the interview he has no idea what a QS does ("you're gonna train me") and gets hired for the cheek. Promotions, relegations, sideways steps, then RICS, AACE section president, region director, VP admin, president.~5:15 · the only job interview of his life
- Chris's trajectory turns on his first consulting project: an oil & gas owner that took project controls seriously, two great mentors, and a paper someone "suckered" him into co-authoring "for this organization called AACE that I'd never heard of before… and that started my decline," he jokes.~7:15
- Mike names the pattern: the accidental profession. Textbooks only ever described one construction career path (become a project manager someday), never estimator, cost engineer or scheduler.~7:55
- Michael Bennink's version: engineering school, the gas utility industry, an MBA, then a colleague came back from doing claims work, he applied, and he's spent ~25 years in disputes "with the same people," across a couple of firms that all pushed volunteering and giving back.~9:25
Preparing the Next Generation
The first topic comes from the community: Christina Robinson, in the room, asks what preparing the next generation of project-controls professionals looks like. Mike answers from the classroom; the panel turns it into the episode's core argument: the fundamentals are table stakes, and the soft skills are the differentiator.
"So often you see these project-controls reports and you come away with, so what? It's about presenting the information: here are the takeaways, here's what management should do with it. There are decisions to be made."Chris Caddell · ~15:05
In the classroom
Mike teaches construction accounting and financial management at Texas A&M, deliberately re-spun toward forward-looking cost engineering. His hook: real GAO audit case studies, which students present to the class, because doing the analysis isn't enough: "you also have to present the results… come across as being an expert." ~11:30
In the bank
Martin's self-appointed mentor, years ago in the UK, tapped him on the shoulder: get qualified, get certified, "get it in the bank." A credential is yours, it travels with you, and internationally, letters behind your name make people listen. ~13:45
- Mike on the gap he sees in peers: analysts unwilling to attach a recommendation to the analysis. "That's really what we need to aspire to."~15:40
- Martin: influence without authority is the job, "no accountability, no decision making… it's the soft skills you've gotta learn, and it's difficult for cost engineers. We're not wired that way."~14:45
- Martin's guardrail on conviction: know your stuff first ("there's only so many times you can bluff through situations"), and reputation compounds.~16:15
- Michael Bennink pushes back on the misnomer that technical people can't communicate: written communication is a practiced skill like any other, and he can still tell AI-generated writing from the organic kind.~16:40
AI: Should the Membership Be Excited or Terrified?
Another community question (Omar Habib, from the UK): as project controls evolves with AI, automation and live data, what should professionals focus on to stay truly valuable? Four people who started their careers on punch cards give a strikingly unafraid answer.
"It's very exciting times. I've waited all my career for some enabler like AI… How long does it take to get a monthly report out? Collating the data, getting approvals, issuing it, having the meeting, and no one pays any attention to it. AI is gonna be right in your face."Martin Darley · ~20:35
The historical frame
Bennink: look at large engineering projects at the turn of the century: rooms full of engineers doing calculations. Technology changed that, punch cards changed it again. "AI will be the same: disruptive, but also an opportunity." ~19:25
The caution
Also Bennink: until it fully takes over, someone still has to make the decisions, and history has already shown what happens when markets grow overdependent on mathematical models. "We're gonna have our issues with AI-driven data collection." ~22:05
- Chris (prepared "over dinner and a few drinks" the night before) on the real unlock: more data than ever, and large models that can find "correlations to things we'd never even thought of."~20:15
- Martin's Spotfire parable: a driller who could produce a thousand reports. "Fantastic, which one do I read?" It ended up three: the three they'd always read. The skill is knowing what matters.~21:15
- Orion channels the students who fear there'll be no jobs in seven or eight years; Mike's answer: AI speeds the process up, but interpreting it (and making the recommendation) still takes people who understand the project. "That's not gonna be replaced at any time that I can see."~23:25
- Chris's reframe: maybe one person does what three did, or maybe there are more buttons to push, and the same people take on more projects.~24:35
- Martin's closer: it isn't about doing more, it's about doing the right stuff, and about recruiting. Offer a job site in Mississippi punching time cards and you can't hire; offer downtown Houston with AI interrogating the data, "they'll take the job."~25:25
The Remote-Work Debate
Orion sets up a fight (Mike has been vocally skeptical of remote work in this industry; Martin worked at Chevron, which embraced it) and asks who's right: is remote work killing project-controls careers? What he gets instead is the most nuanced segment of the hour.
"An important caveat: this is not your parents' remoteness. Working remotely now is a lot different than it looked like six years ago."Chris Caddell · ~30:45
The case for presence
Mike: remote worked during COVID "because it had to work." Moving forward, some on-site presence is non-negotiable: to see impacts and delays contemporaneously instead of retrospectively, and to be a member of the team, not a back office. ~27:25
The case for remote
Martin: "remote" no longer means your home. It means a technical center in India or a financial center in Argentina. Your subject-matter expert is in Egypt? "You just grab them; you don't have to get 'em on a plane anymore." Even hazardous-area inspection is going remote, via robotic dogs. ~28:35
- Martin's warning to the ambitious: "If you're in your bedroom on a laptop, how do you manage your career?" Out of sight is out of mind, and the soft skills this panel just spent a chapter on don't develop through avatars on Teams.~29:25 · he cites IPA's Ed Merrow on the point
- Chris on collaboration: the "got a minute?" drop-in happens on Teams all day long now, and in five years, drones may tour job sites on video. "I don't think it'll ever be a hundred percent replacement."~31:35
- Bennink's worry is generational: new people starting careers remotely never absorb the experienced people around them. "I'm tired of webinars… I want face-to-face meetings. I wanna socialize. That's the backbone of our association."~33:15
- Martin's last word is sensory: "You can watch everything remote in your pajamas, but how do you know what you're looking at if you've never been there?"~34:35
Project Controls Around the World
All four have worked global megaprojects: Bennink was just in Brazil with the association, Martin has worked in over 50 countries. So is project controls the same everywhere, and are people learning the right skills to go international?
"One of my favorite experiences is being stuck in a trailer on a Greek island, working for an Italian contractor, with a project team half from Spain and half from Finland… all the different cultures in the end have the same goal, but can't agree on what to order for lunch."Michael Bennink · ~41:35
- Bennink, from Brazil: "The more people we meet in different places, the more we realize we're all sort of the same", and, eye-openingly, that AACE faces real competition outside North America, which holds more than half its membership.~36:15
- Martin: the discipline travels because AACE's standards and recommended practices are embedded in what global owners and EPCs do: "if people aren't aware of it, they're still doing it." What changes is culture: meeting etiquette, "Brazilian time," literal-minded markets, and geopolitics: an earthquake in Turkey once rippled into a project in Australia.~37:45
- Mike, from his Parsons years on Iraqi reconstruction: there's a road-warrior subculture in project controls: people who want the international postings, often tax-free with hazard pay, banking a nest egg late-career. Find them and you can staff international work for the rest of your career.~39:35
- Chris: cost and schedule are largely the same everywhere; claims are not: legal structures and methodologies differ, "and in some countries you just go out on a golf course and reach some settlement."~40:55
The Big Chair: Leading a Volunteer Association
Only these four can answer Orion's last planned question: what surprised you most about leading the society, versus leading a project? The answers are a candid look inside a professional association: its continuity machinery, its volunteer bottleneck, and why contribution pays back more than it costs.
"There are the users, the people who come to AACE for the recommended practices and the body of knowledge. And there are the contributors, the people who write papers and sit on the technical boards. What you get out of this association as a contributor is exponential over just being a user."Chris Caddell · ~46:45
- Bennink on the job itself: "It's a three-year term that's boiled down to a one-year term", and it goes fast. What makes it work: board continuity, a multi-year strategic plan, and headquarters staff. The common denominator of every route to the chair: "we're all volunteers."~43:15
- Mike's hard-won lesson from chairing the education board: big initiatives (like moving training online) stall when they depend on volunteers who all have day jobs: "we're mostly trying to do two things at once." His open invitation: the committees need help.~45:20
- Chris's math on getting involved: "If you wanna sit in this chair one day, really all you have to do is show an interest and be willing to give some time; what you'll get out of it is so much more than what you have to put into it."~47:15
- Martin on what the chair teaches: servant leadership and influence, "everyone's a volunteer, everyone's got an opinion, and when you're the president, that's the email that gets all the opinions." Looking back, "it's a blast… but it's better being a past president than being the president."~47:45
Lightning Round: Advice to Your 25-Year-Old Self
Ten minutes were reserved for audience Q&A; the crowd stays quiet, so Orion fires the question himself: what's your advice to your 25-year-old self, short answers only. What comes back is the most personal stretch of the hour.
"At 25 I was already running the M&E side of three petrochemical projects on site. I'd got divorced, moved house three times, worked away three years. I was a bit of a train wreck… A mentor got hold of me: slow down, think it through. That's when I started the academic period of my life. I had a plan then."Martin Darley · ~50:25
- Mike: at 25 he was a Marine in Desert Shield/Desert Storm. "It gets better than this… take the lessons wherever you happen to get your start, and leverage the things you can apply down the road." He rarely gets to use the Marine Corps voice anymore, but he remembers how to lead.~49:25
- Martin: the train-wreck years, then five years of intense study: chartered status, value engineering, quality management. From accident to plan.~50:25
- Chris: "Always be asking questions. Always be trying to learn something new."~51:30
- Michael Bennink: "Have some urgency to get where you want to go. Be confident, but take the time to really learn things… Life comes at you fast."~51:40
The Big Ideas
Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a symposium whiteboard would draw them.
Everyone on stage fell into the profession by accident, but nobody accidentally became president. The crossing is built from three deliberate planks.
The technical base
- Estimates, schedules, SPI: "the fundamentals out of the way"
- Knowing your stuff: "only so many times you can bluff"
- The accidental entry: scheduling, estimating, risk
The leadership seat
- Recommendations, not just analysis
- Influence without authority: reputation compounds
- Servant leadership: the chair, the boards, the papers
The panel's shared read: AI collapses the reporting cycle and mines data no team could, but the decision layer (interpretation, recommendation, judgment) stays human.
The panel never picks a winner, because the answer depends on what the work is and where you are in your career.
Remote works. Grab your SME in Egypt without a plane; collaborate across technical centers worldwide.
Hybrid. Robotic dogs and drones extend reach, but impacts still need to be seen contemporaneously, not retrospectively.
Career risk. Out of sight is out of mind: soft skills and mentorship don't transfer through avatars on Teams.
Be there. You can't know what you're looking at if you've never been there: presence is how judgment gets built.
Quote Bank
The best on-the-record lines from all four presidents, gathered in one filterable place. "Highlight" marks the lines most worth scrubbing back for; timestamps are approximate and rebased to Orion's welcome (0:00).
Snakes & Ladders ~5:00–10:45
- Highlight"I wanted to be a rock guitarist like Ritchie Blackmore, but apparently my fingers and brain don't work like his, so I had to get a job."
- "Someone even suckered me into co-authoring a paper for this organization called AACE that I'd never heard of before, and that started my decline," he jokes.
- Highlight"Project controls is kind of the accidental profession: you get introduced to scheduling, estimating, cost management or risk management… and that accidentally becomes the focus of your career."
- "The references always talked about becoming a project manager someday, never about becoming an estimator, a cost engineer or a scheduler. That can become the base of a very lucrative career."
- "Talk about an accidental career: getting into doing disputes and claims is something I didn't even realize existed."
The Next Generation ~10:45–17:00
- "You also have to present the results of the analysis, not be shy about it, really come across as being an expert and being recognized as a member of the team."
- Highlight"You need to get qualified, you need to get certified, just get it in the bank… It's your own credential and you carry it with you. You go international and you've got letters behind your name, and people start listening."
- "You've gotta be able to influence people… it's the soft skills you've gotta learn, and it's difficult for cost engineers. We're not wired that way."
- Highlight"So often you see these project-controls reports and you come away with, so what? It's about presenting the information: here are the takeaways, here's what management should do with it. There are decisions to be made."
- "Being willing to make a recommendation, that's the key. A lot of our peers are sometimes unwilling to put themselves out there… That's really what we need to aspire to."
- "Push back on the misnomer that engineers and technical people can't communicate… learning that skill, practicing that skill and getting feedback on that skill is as important as any other skill."
AI ~17:00–26:05
- "Go back and look at large engineering projects at the turn of the century, rooms full of engineers doing calculations. That was a change pushed by technology. AI will be the same: it's gonna be disruptive, but it's also gonna be an opportunity."
- "There's a lot more data now available than what used to be… if you can have these large models pull in more data, we might find correlations to things that we'd never even thought of."
- Highlight"I've waited all my career for some enabler like AI… How long does it take to get a monthly report out, collating the data, getting approvals, issuing it, having the meeting, and no one pays any attention to it? AI is gonna be right in your face."
- Highlight"I had a guy in drilling who could produce a thousand reports. Fantastic, which one do I read? It ended up three, which were the three we always read historically."
- "Until it fully takes over, someone's gonna have to make the decisions… we've seen in history where financial models that were depended on faltered and literally caused the market to crash."
- "AI should speed up the process, but at the end of the day, it's gonna take someone who understands the project to interpret what AI is providing and make a recommendation… That's not gonna be replaced by AI at any time that I can see."
- "We do a terrible job at projects: benchmarking tells us that 1% of the time we hit cost, schedule and production in the oil and gas business. Just hitting 15 or 20% would be a mega improvement." (Directional, cited from memory.)
- Highlight"Tell them we're gonna send you to a job site in the middle of Mississippi for six months punching time cards, you wouldn't be able to recruit them. Tell them we're gonna sit you in an office in downtown Houston with AI interrogating all this data, they'll take the job."
Remote Work ~26:05–35:15
- "It worked during COVID because it had to work. Moving forward, there still needs to be a certain amount of on-site presence… to really understand what's happening where the rubber meets the road."
- "We started off working from home, and now it's working remote, and when you put the remote into the equation, where is it? It might not be your home. It could be a technical center in India or a financial center down in Argentina."
- Highlight"If you're in your bedroom on a laptop, how do you manage your career?… We're still humans: out of sight is out of mind."
- Highlight"This is not your parents' remoteness. Working remotely now is a lot different than it looked like six years ago."
- "Maybe we'll have drones taking video on job sites so you can sit in your pajamas and tour the job… I don't think it'll ever be a hundred percent replacement."
- "New people starting out working remotely, not getting that interaction and that benefit you get from being around others who are experienced in your field, that worries me… I'm tired of webinars. I want face-to-face meetings. I wanna socialize."
- "You can watch everything remote in your pajamas in your bedroom, but how do you know what you're looking at if you've never been there?"
Around the World ~35:15–42:25
- Highlight"The more people we meet in different places, the more we realize we're all sort of the same."
- "AACE's standards and recommended practices are global… embedded in everything the oil companies and EPCs do. If people aren't aware of it, they're still doing it."
- "If you're on an international project, you're reading the news every day. It could be an earthquake in Turkey, and suddenly you find that affects a project in Australia, and that was a real event."
- "There's a whole subset within the project-controls community, road warriors… willing to go international and be on site for years, putting a nest egg away before they retire."
- "It's largely the same from a cost and schedule perspective. Claims can look quite different… in some countries you just go out on a golf course and reach some settlement."
- Highlight"One of my favorite experiences is being stuck in a trailer on a Greek island, working for an Italian contractor, with a project team half from Spain and half from Finland… all the different cultures in the end have the same goal, but can't agree on what to order for lunch."
The Big Chair ~42:25–48:45
- "It's a three-year term that's boiled down to a one-year term… the commonality of all of it is we're all volunteers."
- "We're mostly trying to do two things at once, work our day job and support the association as best we can… anyone that wants to volunteer to be part of those committees, absolutely, we need the help."
- Highlight"What you get out of this association as a contributor is exponential over just being a user."
- "If you wanna sit in this chair one day, really all you have to do is show an interest and be willing to give some time. What you'll get out of it is so much more than what you have to put into it."
- "You learn skills you can take back to the workplace: servant leadership, influence. Everyone's a volunteer, everyone's got an opinion… when you're the president, that's the email that gets all the opinions."
- "When you look back on it, it's a blast. But it's better being a past president than being the president, that's all I'm gonna say."
Lightning Round ~48:45–54:00
- "I was a Marine in Desert Shield, Desert Storm when I was 25… It gets better than this. Take the lessons wherever you happen to get your start, and leverage the things you can apply down the road."
- Highlight"At 25 I was already running the M&E side of three petrochemical projects… I was a bit of a train wreck. It was at that point: slow down, think it through. That's when I started the academic period of my life… I had a plan then."
- "Always be asking questions. Always be trying to learn something new."
- Highlight"Have some urgency to get where you want to go. Be confident, but take the time to really learn things… Life comes at you fast."
Bookshelf & Links
No books this time (a live panel moves fast), but the panel left a short trail of resources worth following, plus everywhere to find the episode and the show.
From the conversation
- Case studies
- GAO audit reports · Michael Nosbisch teaches from them at Texas A&M: "the audits they do on a yearly basis often have a ton of detail that's really relevant to what we do as project-control professionals."
- Community
- AACE International · join as a contributor, not just a user: "what you get out of this association as a contributor is exponential," says Chris Caddell. The committees are actively recruiting.
- Credentials
- AACE certifications · Martin Darley's standing advice to everyone he mentors: "get qualified, get certified, get it in the bank."
- Research
- Ed Merrow & Independent Project Analysis (IPA): Martin invokes Merrow on how hard it is to manage a career remotely (attribution reconstructed from a garbled transcript line, worth verifying against the audio).
The episode
- Listen
- Episode page (Podbean) · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
- Re-release
- "150+ Years of Project Controls Wisdom: Lessons from Four AACE Presidents" (May 15, 2026, Podbean): the same session, re-released under a new title.
- The panel
- Michael Nosbisch, Martin Darley, Chris Caddell & Michael Bennink. Find them through AACE International.
- The host
- Orion Matthews on LinkedIn · Queryon
- The show
- themajorprojectpodcast.com: new conversations from the people building projects over US$1 billion.