How Big Things Get Done

Important, timely, instructive and entertaining. What more could you ask for? -- Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of <i>Thinking, Fast and Slow</i> A wise, vivid and unforgettable combination of inspiring storytelling with decades of practical research and experience -- Tim Harford, bestselling author of <i>How to Make the World Add Up</i> Entertaining . . . compelling . . . there are lessons here for managers of all stripes -- <i>Economist</i> Full of delicious anecdotes about project management disasters . . . Flyvbjerg and co-author Gardner succeed in extracting valuable lessons from these failures - and some occasional successes -- <i>Financial Times</i> Having researched the properties of planning errors, I am confident that nobody has studied the topic more broadly and deeply than Bent Flyvbjerg. His focus ranges from Olympic Games to the renovation of your dog house -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, and author of <i>The Black Swan</i> My only complaint about this book is that it wasn't written earlier. It distills decades of systematic research from thousands of projects. The result is a crystal-clear pattern of surprising reasons why almost all big human projects fail to deliver as expected -- Ola Rosling, bestselling co-author of <i>Factfulness</i> The best scientific advice on project planning. It is arguably the bargain of the century. For a few dollars you can tap into thousands of dollars of insights in executive-education classrooms -- Philip Tetlock, bestselling co-author of <i>Superforecasting</i> A truly fascinating read. There's a practical pay-off, too: a toolbox with eleven smart heuristics for better project leadership that every planner should know -- Gerd Gigerenzer, author of <i>Gut Feelings</i>

Bent Flyvbjerg is a professor at Oxford University, an economist, and 'the world's leading megaproject expert', according to global accounting network KPMG. He has consulted on over one hundred projects costing $1 billion or more and has been knighted by the Queen of Denmark. Dan Gardner is a journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of Risk, Future Babble and Superforecasting (with Philip E. Tetlock).