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On the surface, this could look like just one of those management books. And we all know what those management books contain. Lots of hot air, self-important "what I call ..." coining (literally turning banalities into coins).

What made me curious about this book was the negative phrasing of the book. My impression of management literature is that the people in charge for that genre - publishers and readers (managers) - dislike negativity. It's always turning things around to the positive other side, the constructive, the challenge not the problem etc etc. It's compulsive and hence not very believable. So a management book about the dysfunctions of an executive team? I'm all ears.

And I was not disappointed. In fact, I was wholly convinced, engaged in the reading and even touched from time to time. The characters in this book are not cartoonist, but believable and even likeable. Who wouldn't want to have a Kathryn Petersen in their life? It takes an author with tremendously high emotional intelligence to make people come so much alive, all the little dramas and suspense of a meeting between people that disagree, have fears about change, looking at themselves, admitting mistakes and deciding to do things differently etc.

You can read summaries of the theory laid out in the book many other places.

The book is organized around eleven principles that can also be summarized into memorable heuristics. Flyvbjerg is able to draw on a lot of relevant data to make his conclusions more realistic and show why his forecasts are closer to what actually happens (how long things take and how expensive they will be). He covers topics like project leadership and management, teams, defining a clear purpose to guide the project, using modularity (building with lego), extending the planning phase and shortening delivery phase (think slow, act fast), using reference-classes to learn from other projects (taking the outside view), minimizing the risk for catastrophic unknown-unknowns (yes, it's possible to deal with unknown-unknowns).

Flyvbjerg's own experience is mostly with infrastructure projects, among those megaprojects, as well as medium-sized building projects. He does mention IT projects from time to time, and other projects made entirely out of code or language. But it is rare he delves deeply into those areas. I'm an educational developer and part of my job is to develop teaching material, settings, plan etc. A process I can learn a lot from this book, but wish I had a perspective that was more from the inside: How big things get done in fields that consist almost entirely of people speaking to each other.

#howbigthingsgetdone #infrastructure #megaprojects #modularity #projectmanagement

In the American "non-fiction" tradition, but one of the better examples of that style. The author is writing from the perspective of someone that both has been diagnosed with Parkinson and also has experience writing. That makes it a highly readable book, but never just settles for scratching the surface and enters the topic with a seriousness only a person with the diagnose themself would bring. A very hopeful book also, in spite of the tremendously complex disease, but this is part of the point. And having read it, I do find a lot of hope. The book was especially interesting in the chapters that showed how our understanding of Parkinson and some other neurodegenerative diseases are getting upturned these years, where diagnosis often happens when the disease has progressed for many years, sometimes decades. A new frontier of research is trying to make it possible to catch Parkinson and similar diseases way earlier when no one suspects anything.

#Parkinson #neurodegenerative #neurology #brainscience #medicine