How Big Things Get Done

How Big Things Get Done unveils secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale, from economist Bent Flyvbjerg and journalist Dan Gardner.

Important, timely, instructive and entertaining . What more could you ask for?

A wise, vivid and unforgettable combination of inspiring storytelling with decades of practical research and experience

Entertaining . . . compelling . . . there are lessons here for managers of all stripes

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

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

My only complaint about this book is that it wasn’t written earlier. It distils 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

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

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

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).

Together they have written How Big Things Get Done .