Get the Summary of Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner's How Big Things Get Done in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "How Big Things Get Done" examines the challenges and complexities of managing large-scale projects, drawing on Bent Flyvbjerg's extensive research into over 16,000 projects across various sectors. The book reveals a consistent pattern of megaprojects exceeding budgets, missing deadlines, and underdelivering on benefits, a phenomenon Flyvbjerg terms the "Iron Law of Megaprojects." The authors discuss the inherent risks in complex systems and the importance of thorough planning and efficient delivery to mitigate these risks...

The secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale—from home renovation to space exploration—by the world's leading expert on megaprojects. Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months. These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, 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, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours. For example: 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. Be a team maker. You won't succeed without an "us." Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can't, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can. Know that your biggest risk is you. Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House, to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, to a home renovation in Brooklyn gone awry, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done—on time and on budget.

The Executive Playbook to Lead Business Growth, Innovation and Transformation. The first leadership book for the age of artificial intelligence, equipping leaders with principles and tactics to achieve audacious outcomes and solve complex problems, while smartly managing the inherent risks of bold moves. Applying this playbook will impact your business and, just as critically, propel and protect your career as a bold transformational executive. Co-authored by John Rossman, author of The Amazon Way and Think Like Amazon, and Kevin McCaffrey, seasoned executives from Amazon, Google, and T-Mobile. This fast-moving book melds their direct leadership experiences with comprehensive research and authentic stories. Actionable insights include: Pinpointing Growth Opportunities: Identify your customer's primary frustrations and unmet needs with standout features, forming the foundation for sustainable business growth. Mastering Strategic Communication: Develop skills to ensure alignment, clarity, and vital stakeholder involvement through effective strategic communication. Prioritizing through High-Impact Experimentation: Implement cost-effective, swift, and impactful experimentation methods, utilizing memos and debates for maximum effect. Redefining Cost Models for Winning Business Models: Learn to innovate cost structures alongside improving customer experiences for a transformative impact on your business. Overcoming Inertia and Analysis Paralysis: Discover tactics to break free from conventional pace and decision-making traps by creating focused teams and unique operational environments. Maximizing Return on Effort: Craft a governance approach that provides high quality, timely signals for your strategic endeavors without the usual bureaucratic overhead. With your book purchase you also get a trove of resources including practical frameworks, real-world examples, a Big Bet journal, generative AI prompts , and a Big Bet GPT. These tools are designed to drive active integration of the principles of Big Bet Leadership in your business.

In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Gardner explores a new way of thinking about the decisions we make. We are the safest and healthiest human beings who ever lived, and yet irrational fear is growing, with deadly consequences — such as the 1,595 Americans killed when they made the mistake of switching from planes to cars after September 11. In part, this irrationality is caused by those — politicians, activists, and the media — who promote fear for their own gain. Culture also matters. But a more fundamental cause is human psychology. Working with risk science pioneer Paul Slovic, author Dan Gardner sets out to explain in a compulsively readable fashion just what that statement above means as to how we make decisions and run our lives. We learn that the brain has not one but two systems to analyze risk. One is primitive, unconscious, and intuitive. The other is conscious and rational. The two systems often agree, but occasionally they come to very different conclusions. When that happens, we can find ourselves worrying about what the statistics tell us is a trivial threat — terrorism, child abduction, cancer caused by chemical pollution — or shrugging off serious risks like obesity and smoking. Gladwell told us about “the black box” of our brains; Gardner takes us inside, helping us to understand how to deconstruct the information we’re bombarded with and respond more logically and adaptively to our world. Risk is cutting-edge reading.

Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.

Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

One of the joys of product development, whether it be software, service, or hardware, is getting it right. The way to get it right is to uncover the real business problem, and to write the requirements for the solution that best solves that problem. Without the right requirements it is impossible to build the right solution. Mastering the Requirements Process, Fourth Edition, gives you an industry-proven process for getting to the essence of the business problem and then writing unambiguous and testable requirements for its solution. This fourth edition is an almost complete rewrite that brings requirements discovery into today's world--it is the book for today's business analyst. Product owners and project leaders will also find it valuable as it explains how to discover precisely what the customer needs and wants, and to do it effectively in any business or project environment. The book tells you how to: Use the Volere requirements process to discover requirements in both traditional and agile environments Incorporate off-the-shelf (OTS) solutions into your requirements discovery Use artificial intelligence (AI) as part of your requirements discovery, and as part of your business solution Use quickly sketched prototypes to explore the problem space Understand functional and non-functional requirements Write better agile stories Make your requirements and stories measurable and testable using fit criteria Use business events as the heartbeat of business analysis Discover requirements in agile, commercial, and milspec project environments Find and prioritize your customer segments Leverage systems thinking when discovering requirements Use story maps and other requirements repository techniques Know which trawling techniques are the most effective for requirements discovery Synchronize your requirements discovery with agile development teams Make better decisions in the early days of a project to increase your chances of success Employ the Volere requirements specification template (downloaded 10,000+ times) as the basis for your own requirement specifications "One of the most valuable things about this book is that it provides a process to follow that will get people asking the right questions and expand their perspective on the problem." --Kevin Brennan Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.