How Big Things Get Done, by Bent Flyvbjerg
Ghassan Shahzad
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 by Bent Flyvbjerg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’d love to love this book. I’ve tried my hand at quite a few ‘pop’-social-science books this past year — the type a certain group on twitter love recommending — but none of them clicked with me. Mostly, for a few reasons: they could’ve been condensed into a short article or blogpost; they were insanely repetitive and sloppily written; at points, they were basically wrong.
This book, on the other hand, is written by an academic. Well written but not overly dry, it also really resonated with me — for the first few chapters, at least. After that, it became a slog and repetitive, like other pop books tend to become. I imagine that, in the interest of being popular, authors of such books avoid getting into the nitty-gritty — as a textbook would. This means, however, that they end up repeating the same talking points over and over for lack of any more substance. No more of these for me, frankly.
Still, it did resonate with me. Bent talks a lot about planning; I’m not influential enough to be planning anything big, but I’ve always held wargaming as a hobby. The practical wisdom that Brent elucidates here is obvious to most wargamers intuitively: you learn to layer your plans in broad-strokes, and then thin ones; always hedge your bets; plan for the worst and hold some forces in reserve. I would quote Eisenhower, but everybody does that so I won’t. Regardless, Bent helped me put in words a lot of stuff I knew, and stuff I didn’t. I recommend it for that reason, though you should be prepared to drop it once it gets too boring.
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