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How Big Things Get Done
- The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's summary
Best Books of 2023 in The Financial Times
Shortlisted for Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023
‘Important, timely, instructive and entertaining’ – Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
'Entertaining . . . compelling . . . there are lessons here for managers of all stripes' – The Economist
Megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg and bestselling author Dan Gardner reveal the secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious projects on any scale.
Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. Think of how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to an enormously successful product launch in eleven months. But such successes are the exception. Consider how London’s Crossrail project delivered five years late and billions over budget. More modest endeavours, 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. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed:
- 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.
- Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.
Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House to the making of Pixar blockbusters, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done – on time and on budget.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Critic reviews
"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)
"My only complaint about this book is that it wasn’t written earlier. It distills 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)
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- By Anonymous User on 12-16-21
By: Jeff Lawson
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Good to Great
- Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
- By: Jim Collins
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
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Good info, over-the-top narration
- By Anaxamaxan on 08-31-10
By: Jim Collins
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Getting Green Done
- Hard Truths From the Frontlines of Sustainability Revolution
- By: Auden Schendler
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Soccer moms drive Priuses. Sport utility vehicles are going hybrid. Families are using hemp shopping bags. More and more companies are developing "green" buildings. What's more, the business consultants say going green is easy and profitable. In reality, though, many green-leaning businesses, families, and governments are still fiddling with the small stuff while the planet burns. Why?
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Green's Dirty Little Secrets
- By Martin on 07-10-09
By: Auden Schendler
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The Toyota Way
- 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer
- By: Jeffrey K. Liker
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In factories around the world, Toyota consistently makes the highest-quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer, while using fewer man-hours, less on-hand inventory, and half the floor space of its competitors. The Toyota Way is the first book for a general audience that explains the management principles and business philosophy behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.
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A good short intro
- By Shane K. on 07-16-24
By: Jeffrey K. Liker
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In Pursuit of Elegance
- Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
- By: Matthew E. May
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In this thought-provoking exploration, Matthew May defines elegance as the elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power, and pinpoints the four key elements that characterize it: seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, physics, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers a surprising array of stories that illustrate why what's "not there" often matters more than what is.
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I love elegance, but this book isn't elegant
- By Oliver Nielsen on 06-26-11
By: Matthew E. May
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything
- How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data
- By: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.
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Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow
- By Nathan Burnham on 05-06-17
By: Malcolm Frank, and others
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Little Bets
- How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
- By: Peter Sims
- Narrated by: John Allen Nelson
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Best-selling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.
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Useful approach, not for everyone
- By Tad Davis on 08-15-11
By: Peter Sims
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Car Guys vs. Bean Counters
- The Battle for the Soul of American Business
- By: Bob Lutz
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy. When Lutz got into the auto business in the early sixties, CEOs knew that if you captured the public's imagination with great cars, the money would follow.
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Opinionated and one-sided
- By Michael Parks on 06-23-11
By: Bob Lutz
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Group Genius
- The Creative Power of Collaboration
- By: Keith Sawyer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.
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Worth reading
- By Glenn on 12-29-10
By: Keith Sawyer
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Effortless
- Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most
- By: Greg McKeown
- Narrated by: Greg McKeown
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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As high achievers, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the path to success is paved with relentless work. That if we want to overachieve, we have to overexert, overthink, and overdo. That if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we’re not doing enough. But lately, working hard is more exhausting than ever. And the more depleted we get, the more effort it takes to make progress. Stuck in an endless loop of “Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat”, we’re often working twice as hard to achieve half as much.
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Laced with mistakes!
- By LEE on 04-28-21
By: Greg McKeown
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Power and Prediction
- The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
- By: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb
- Narrated by: Tom Beyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction, they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it.
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Inspire system thinking with informative examples
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 11-16-22
By: Ajay Agrawal, and others
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Inside Drucker's Brain
- By: Jeffrey A. Krames
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In late 2003, Peter Drucker invited Jeffrey Krames to his home in Claremont, California, for a rare interview. The 94-year-old Drucker who had amassed an unprecedented body of published work, comprised of many hundreds of thousands of pages, spent a full day sharing his insights from a lifetime of management consulting and writing. This resulting audiobook is a simple guide that distills the essential wisdom from Drucker's considerable body of work.
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Learn From the Master
- By morton on 10-24-08
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The Self-Made Billionaire Effect
- How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
- By: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.
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Waste of time!
- By Anonymous User on 05-30-20
By: John Sviokla, and others
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Moments of Impact
- How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change
- By: Chris Ertel, Lisa Kay Solomon
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moments of Impact is an audiobook on a mission: to eradicate time-sucking, energy-depleting workshops and meetings. In our fast-changing world, organizations have important challenges and opportunities to address - and no time to waste. Moments of Impact delivers the single most useful resource for managers and leaders who need better strategic conversation - now - to shape the future of their organizations.
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Another audiobook failure. Buy the real book
- By Jonathan on 02-08-15
By: Chris Ertel, and others
What listeners say about How Big Things Get Done
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cliente Amazon
- 10-15-23
Very useful insights
Lived the multiple examples, lived the modular approach. Felt experience is key, not use untested capabilities, first movers are riskier so go small, test & learn and apply modularity. Lots of small things make big things
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- Kamil Kuchar
- 08-20-24
would recommend
Amazing book for anyone planning or directing large projects. Interesting insights which came with some unexpected conclusions. I feel like the climate-focused ending could've been omitted as it was not important to the observations and lessons presented in this book. Either way, well done to the authors, can only recommend.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-22-24
Great lesson in project management
Very interesting and accessible book, exploring the factors that make projects a success or failure. Backed with statistics and anecdotes. Clearly and calmly read.
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- Poul Geert Hamsen
- 01-08-24
Easy to understand
Many examples from real projects that can be applaid in your reality and different projects.
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- Gregory
- 09-10-24
Great examples and storytelling.
Impressive but yet simple to follow book. Covers again simple but important topics. And it's all rooted in experience, projects across the globe.
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- wasnah
- 01-22-24
Rob Shapiro is the king of the mic
The book is amazing, and Rob have an engaging and smooth narration that kept me interested!
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- Thomas Richards
- 03-29-24
A classic
Well packaged narrative around some helpfully empirical observations. Definitely worth a read for anyone involved in major (or any) projects.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-16-24
The author is just obsessed with his own accomplishments…
Slow nook basically summed up in one sentence:
Think slow, act fast
Too many examples!
The author comes across as arrogant and self obsessed about his own accomplishments.
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