Book Review (TL;DR - just buy it)

For over twenty five years of managing complex projects I've preached "Think before you plan, plan before you do, then do with the team you have."

This practical philosophy has not been a way to make a lot of money as a consultant. It's very unfashionable. The business mantra, at least here in the USSA, is "Move fast and break things." Which is a hell of a way to make a long-term drug release implant, or an emergency medicine intervention, or move a 100 million a month manufacturing facility from Europe to Mexico without leaving patients without their meds. But I digress.

What I am trying to explain from personal experience is that practical wisdom isn't always profitable for independents or for employees. What is profitable is the BigName consulting firms and their wonderfully successful money harvesting, which burns huge amounts of coin and lives while enriching senior partners and shareholders (see NYC subway extensions, Boston's Big Dig, and the USSA Opioid epidemic, for example).

GSD (Getting Shit Done) is remarkably unglamorous and often tedious. The real world is fractally complicated. As one of my professors at Harvey Mudd once said, "The universe is a gigantic and ancient and complicated system whose main purpose is humiliating cocky engineers."

I make a humble living cleaning up product launches, occasionally doing up front planning support for various device and pharma companies of a more enlightened sort, and every once in a while turning around a company in a crisis. I'm still amazed at how almost always the management thinks their situation is unique! Sorry, folks. Every project and every business is just like all the others - the underlying details and technologies and customers are vastly divergent - but the means and methods to accomplish a project or a turnaround are the same: hard facts, basic maths, logistics, time and money, human factors, complexity, dependencies.

So you cannot imaging my delight at stumbling on a book by someone vastly better at this than I can aspire to, and an honest to goodness academic researching these things as well.

"How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flybvjerg & Dan Gardner blows my mind.

After so many years out here in the wilderness, it's amazing to read so many well researched examples of the stuff that I was taught and practice - but made clear and concise in ways that I only aspire to, and with detailed statistics and insight to support the claims.

Let me simplify my book review of this particular work's first few chapters in a succinct simple sentence: I have sent copies of the hardcover edition to all of the people I respect and some of the clients I like.

Expect chapter drill-down review when I catch my breath. Just buy it and read a chapter at a time and you will be better at what you do, and feel better about it too. Teasers: Chapter One, "Think slow, act fast." Chapter Six, "So you think your project is unique?" Why are you still reading this blog post? Get the book.

PS) Please buy "How Big Things Get Done" at bookshop.com and not Amazon (speaking of evil). I don't get a dime either way, I just like bookshop.com and hate Amazon.