In the book How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between, the authors give insight into how to plan and deliver projects on any scale.
Key Details
- Oxford professor and economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg and New York Times best-selling author Dan Gardner discuss in the book how to succeed in any project, regardless of how big or how small.
- The book distinguishes the mistakes that caused problems to fail and how to fix them to succeed.
- The authors discuss research-based principles that will lead to success in projects, such as…
- Understanding your odds
- Planning slow and acting fast
- Starting with a goal and outlining the steps to reach it
- Finding your lego to start small and build big
- Being a team
- Master the unknowns
- Know that your biggest risk is yourself
Why it’s important
All big projects start from somewhere—the largest buildings in the world were once a sketch and the most successful businesses all started from an idea.
Flyvbjerg and Gardner discuss how to take the tiniest ideas and make them successful, whether it is a home improvement project or something as big as building a rocket ship.
The authors give tips on how to succeed and explain what decisions others made that led to failure, but one of the biggest obstacles they say you have to overcome is fear within yourself.
Flyvbjerg has been referred to as “the world’s leading megaproject expert,” and he outlines his expertise teaches others to distinguish the triumphs from the failures of any project.
Notable review
“Over-budget and over-schedule is an inevitability. Incompetence and grift is outrageous. Bent Flyvbjerg, with this terrific data-driven book, has shown that there is another way,” says Frank Gehry.
