"Bud, that's crazy!", I told him. "We've hardly even
  started yet. There's no way we can get it done by then."

  "I know," he responded, in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  "You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don't
  you correct it?" 

  "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 
  1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to 
  describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a 
  reality distortion field."

  "A what?"

  "A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is 
  malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.
  It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to
  have realistic schedules. And there's a couple of other
  things you should know about working with Steve."

  "What else?"

  "Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or
  great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. 
  You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really
  funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually
  tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually
  likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and
  propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."

  I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve
  in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field
  was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an
  indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the
  purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he
  would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you
  off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own,
  without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.

  Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective 
  even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would 
  fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential
  techniques for grounding it (see Are You Gonna Do It?), but
  after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of
  nature.