Description

By (author) Flyvbjerg Bent; By (author) Gardner Dan

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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.

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Best Books of the Year –
The Financial Times
and The Economist

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2023

World expert Bent Flyvbjerg and bestselling author Dan Gardner reveal the secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious projects on any scale.

‘Important, timely, instructive and entertaining’ – Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. Think of how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to an enormously successful product launch in eleven months. But such successes are the exception. Consider how London’s Crossrail project delivered five years late and billions over budget. More modest endeavours, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed:

Understand your odds. If you don’t know them, you won’t win.
Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it’s wrong.
Think right to left. Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there.
Find your Lego. Big is best built from small.
Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.

Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done – on time and on budget.

”Entertaining . . . compelling . . . there are lessons here for managers of all stripes” – The Economist

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

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

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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A truly fascinating read.
There’s a practical pay-off, too: a too