About the Author

Bent Flyvbjerg is a professor at Oxford University, an economist, and 'the world's leading megaproject expert', according to global accounting network KPMG. He has consulted on over one hundred projects costing $1 billion or more and has been knighted by the Queen of Denmark.

Dan Gardner is a journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of Risk, Future Babble and Superforecasting (with Philip E. Tetlock).

Reviews

Important, timely, instructive and entertaining. What more could you ask for?
*Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow*

A wise, vivid and unforgettable combination of inspiring storytelling with decades of practical research and experience
*Tim Harford, bestselling author of How to Make the World Add Up*

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

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
*Financial Times, 'FT business books: What to read this month'*

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
*Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, and author of The Black Swan*

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
*Ola Rosling, bestselling co-author of Factfulness*

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
*Philip Tetlock, bestselling co-author of Superforecasting*

A truly fascinating read. There’s a practical pay-off, too: a toolbox with eleven smart heuristics for better project leadership that every planner should know
*Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Gut Feelings*