Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

A reckless egomaniac with no professional standards really shouldn’t be leading a potentially world‑saving project, writes Richard Young, but here we are…

Raiders of the Lost Ark, celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2021, pits a swashbuckling adventurer (Harrison Ford) against a sinister cabal of Nazis. The film is a textbook case of how not to run a project – and who not to manage it.

Project management is the careful planning of time, resources and skills in a logical sequence towards a clear objective. Indy’s journey to win control of the Ark of the Covenant is a reckless and haphazard cascade of blunders that endangers his team and fails to achieve any of the deliverables outlined in his project scope.

Indiana Jones: total loser

Indy himself is a terrible person. We meet him trekking the Peruvian rainforest to an abandoned temple. Any half‑decent academic archaeologist would be circumspect about finding a site of historic and cultural significance. After all, this is the holy site of a highly developed lost civilisation.

But Indy’s not so much project managing this exploration as project mangling it, setting off mechanical and even optical traps that display the builders’ fantastically advanced technology and workmanship. How are their mechanisms still working? How did they manufacture them? What created the impetus for such innovation? Such questions don’t interest Indy. All he cares about is stealing a golden idol.

One narrow escape later and he’s fallen into the clutches of rival snarky‑ologist René Belloq (Paul Freeman), who sends some understandably annoyed indigenous people to kill him. He makes it to his plane and flies back to his university job in the US. Project outcome: FAIL.

Lessons unlearnt

Indy’s boss Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) fits the role of programme director. He explains that agents have come to talk about a new project for him to sink his teeth into. But before we get to that main plot of the film, let’s review Indy’s project management failures so far:

Poor team selection and safeguarding. One guide runs away, the other tries to kill him; both of them end up dead. Indy’s managed to pick a pilot whose pet is a creature that he has a pathological fear of. How did that get past HR?
Breaches of professional ethics. As outlined, he’s essentially a looter. Put another way, even in the 1930s, the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists might have blanched at his attitude to preserving antiquities.
Terrible project planning. Any project manager knows that the best way to avoid disasters is to pre‑mortem potential pitfalls. In Indy’s case, they’re also literal pitfalls. What did he think was going to happen when he broke into a temple full of booby traps?

Undeterred by this failed project – and with no attempt to examine any lessons learned – the agents ask Indy to investigate a Nazi dig in Egypt. They’re looking for the Ark, apparently a weapon of tremendous power. So the agents – Indy’s new sponsors – hire him to beat the Nazis to it. How nice of them to overlook his track record of losing out to Belloq…

Diversity and inclusion

The first task on the Gantt chart? Locate the all‑important headpiece of the Staff of Ra, used to pinpoint the Ark’s secret location on a giant scale model of the lost city of Tanis.

The headpiece belongs to Indy’s old flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), now a hard‑drinking bar owner in Nepal. After proving how quickly a person can sober up, she negotiates her way onto his project team – she is terrible at ‘lessons learned’, too. The reunion is interrupted by Nazis who succeed in burning down her bar – and scorching one side of the headpiece into the palm of a Gestapo officer (Ronald Lacey). But Indy and Marion escape; back at the university, the diversity and inclusion officer is breathing a sigh of relief that such a high‑profile project now has an even gender split.

The project hots up

The one project management skill Indy does seem to exhibit is strong relationship‑building. In Egypt, they team up with old buddy Sallah el‑Kahir (John Rhys‑Davies – better known as Gimli the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings). And it’s here we find the real project management hero of the movie (see box). With him on the case, the project really progresses. Indy’s contribution at this stage, by contrast, is to run around Cairo shooting swordsmen, then cause a truck explosion that results in Marion’s apparent death.

We all know the next few scenes. Marion’s really alive. Indy still hates snakes. They find the Ark and are lifting it out of place when… oops. Despite knowing the project has a massive obstacle – a bunch of Nazis and Belloq calling the shots on the site – Indy fails to prepare any kind of lookout and all Sallah’s hard work is undone. External dependencies anyone? Thanks to his failure to sweat the details or do a risk analysis, the bad guys have the Ark and Marion is stuck down in the snake‑infested mausoleum with her lousy ex.

After an improbable escape – the buried temple happens to have an exterior wall right next to the airfield where the Nazis take the Ark – Indy engages in an admittedly agile pivot. He and Marion don’t exactly break out the Post‑Its for a scrum, but he takes the initiative and after killing a truck driver and a couple of other Nazi no‑marks, the project is back on track.

But the steamer they put the Ark on is hijacked by a U‑boat. This is the final nail for Indy as project manager. A project lead can have lousy management skills and lack attention to detail – so long as they’re lucky. And Indy really isn’t. If anything, he’s a Jonah.

Gott mit uns?

Belloq takes the Ark to a nice Aegean island. Indy sneaks ashore and has a chance to fire a bazooka to prevent the Nazis using it – but chickens out. So: defiling temples for a golden payday is fine; but blowing up a relic to stop the literal Nazis accessing a weapon that might make their armies invincible? Nah, just can’t do it, sorry. Projects thrive on consistency of decision‑making and clear progress towards objectives, but this guy is all over the place.

Another project #FAIL.

He and Marion are tied up. The Nazis open the box and… It turns out God’s not a fan of Nazis. Or maybe not a fan of opening the Ark. Even the project’s culmination is another failure for Indy – the Ark is hidden away in a giant secret warehouse so even the archaeological sciences won’t benefit. Might as well have blown it up, eh Indy?

Projects need to be properly scoped and well informed. Project managers need discipline, drive and attention to detail. They need reliable, well‑managed teams. Raiders of the Lost Ark features none of those things, Sallah aside.

Indiana Jones himself has some redeeming features. It’s true that a winning smile, a degree of charm and a dose of fearlessness can be very effective tools for the project manager. Indy learns to manage his fear of snakes; and he’s smart enough to know not to look upon the spirits unleashed from the Ark.

That combination of charisma and common sense can be valuable for any project leader. But overall, the project to deny the Nazis access to a super‑weapon is incredibly poorly run and fails. The fact that it ends face‑meltingly badly for the bad guys in the end suggests something we’ve secretly suspected all along: God is a great project manager.

Sallah: project linchpin

Sallah el‑Kahir is the real deal in project management terms and the linchpin of Indy’s project team. He knows his own terrain well – great project managers thrive on good connections across their organisation and industry – and works through objectives like a machine:

Helps decode the headpiece.
Sorts out accommodation.
Lays on disguises.
Works out how to infiltrate the map room.
Hires diggers at the correct site of the Ark.
Handles logistics for its removal from its resting place.
Arranges transportation to the US.

He’s jovial, adding hugely to project morale. And every project needs someone with the soft eyes and attention to detail that Sallah brings. He notices a pet monkey has died and prevents Indy from eating one of the same poison dates, for example. We all know a Sallah. Not a project lead, nowhere near board level – but the kind of person who actually gets things done. The fact that he’s prepared to work with disaster‑magnet Indiana Jones just goes to prove how important charisma is for a project leader.