"This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining. What more could you ask for?"--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

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 Yorks skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apples 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 Bostons "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 Californias high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon--and wont 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 lifes work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed "the worlds 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:....