My experience both personally and in business has taught that things almost always takes longer than expected. It's the unexpected that prolongs things.

According to the book you are reading it sounds as though most Boards suffer from Physics Envy. I think we've discussed that topic a few times but, mathematically calculating the unknown seems a desperate attempt to quantify the unknown. Said differently, let's try to quantify the unquantifiable. How does someone quantify an unknown? If we know the outcome, we could use some eigth grade Algebra to determine the unknown, but we don't know the outcome. As Rumsfeld once said, " We don't know, what we don't know".

With that said, integrating one company instead of several at one time has to be significantly easier. Common sense says so. Also, the fact that they have successfully integrated several Long Haul companies in the past and since GLBC is a Long Haul company suggests they should be getting more credit than what they are. When considering level3 problems arose after trying to integrate multiple disparate networks simultaneously, one would think that integrating one network would be thought of at least a little differently. I was pretty vocal about Level3 taking much longer than expected when integrating the metro acquisitions simultaneously. But integrating GLBC seems much more straight forward. I'll leave the precision up to the BOD, but I'm comfortable enough with good ole common sense.