“This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

"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."

— Frank Gehry, architect

"A wise, vivid, and unforgettable combination of inspiring storytelling with decades of practical research and experience . . . Everyone who deals with large projects is already desperate to read this book. The rest of us will take great pleasure in learning from it anyway."

— Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective

"My only complaint about this book is that it wasn’t written earlier. Finally, here’s a guide to navigating the embarrassingly predictable mistakes we all tend to make when taking on life’s biggest and most important projects. Unlike so many other books from self-proclaimed business gurus, How Big Things Get Done is not based on mere anecdotes; it distills decades of systematic research from more than sixteen thousand projects worldwide. The result is a crystal-clear pattern of surprising reasons why almost all big human projects fail to deliver as expected—and a road map for the book’s lucky readers to avoid them."

— Ola Rosling, CEO and co-founder of Gapminder; co-author of Factfulness

"If we’re to make it through these next few decades, we’re going to have to build a lot of stuff—and we’re going to have to do it cheaply and fast. Here’s a very useful handbook!"

— Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

"Flyvbjerg’s study of big construction projects worldwide has led him to formulate the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again. His deep understanding of why big projects fail—and occasionally succeed—makes this book a truly fascinating read. There’s a practical payoff, too: a toolbox with eleven smart heuristics for better project leadership that every planner who wants to succeed should know."

— Gerd Gigerenzer, psychologist, author of Gut Feelings

"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 the Olympic Games to the renovation of your doghouse."

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguished professor of risk engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and author of the Incerto series

"This book distills the best scientific advice on planning big projects. And it is arguably the bargain of the century. For a few dollars you can tap into thousands of dollars’ worth of insights in executive-education classrooms—and if you happen to be a CEO or head of state, the savings will quickly run into the billions."

— Philip E. Tetlock, co-author of Superforecasting

"...it is full of delicious anecdotes about project management disasters. Movie flop Heaven’s Gate was already five days behind schedule after just six days of shooting, which had yielded just a minute and a half of usable material. The Sydney Opera House turned out to be unbuildable to its original design (“a magnificent doodle” in critic Robert Hughes’ memorable description) and, once finished, was acoustically unsuitable for opera. [The authors] succeed in extracting valuable lessons from these failures — and some occasional successes."

— Financial Times

"It’s a book that every legislator, city council member and corporate executive ought to read."

— Wall Street Journal

"Ignore (this book) at your peril."

— Peter Coy, The New York Times

"An entertaining new book.... There are lessons here for managers of all stripes."

— The Economist

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