One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and …
The Old Guard which had foisted Moses' candidacy upon the GOP as adequately punished, in influence would remain strong in the party, out awaty leaders who couldn't afford to let their local candidates caugure in the undertow of the sinking of a poor candidate and who were determined that one as poor as Moses should never again head the ticket, would never let the Old Guard hand-pick another candidate. His candidacy was its Waterloo.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
I’m loving the beauty of “plan for energy abundance “.
I also love the thoughtful discussion of how systems can be robust and reliable through redundancy. And how we need more slack in systems to plan for resilience as well.
In my world of distributed systems we do a lot to plan for capacity and available slack in systems. Making sure you have slack in a system is incredibly important because shocks to it aren’t linear.
Barrent had been tried, convicted, and memory-washed on Earth-an Earth strangely altered and stratified by …
Content warning
Plot reveal
From these conversations, Barrent learned that the grim-faced guards were human beings, just like the prisoners on Omega. Most of the guards didn't seem to like the work they were doing. Like Omegans, they longed for a return to Barth.
Barrent had been tried, convicted, and memory-washed on Earth-an Earth strangely altered and stratified by …
This is definitely an old school “one thing happens after another “ adventure. Barely any character, flat world, events piled on each other. The lean style of a good short story but… a lot
The secrets to successfully planning and delivering projects on any scale—from home renovation to space …
Why big things don't get done
4 stars
If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don't get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either - big things fail by a lot. In a database of "16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries" he finds that "99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these."
And it shouldn't be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.
Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn't duck the question, he has real answers, like:
Many …
If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don't get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either - big things fail by a lot. In a database of "16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries" he finds that "99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these."
And it shouldn't be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.
Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn't duck the question, he has real answers, like:
Many projects start without defining why they need to happen. Without a defined why, decisions aren't always steering to the north star and not everyone will have the same vision.
People act too early and don't plan well before they get started. He goes into how to do that better - pointing out how Pixar did it really well with low stakes small versions.
When people get started early, they get delayed on every new emergency, so it takes longer than expected - and every day late is a chance for a new unexpected incident or emergency. Fast is good once you have a tight plan.
People estimate poorly because they think their project is special instead of finding a good match of things that have been done before.
People lie about the costs so they can use sunk costs to demand more funding when they exceed the budget. (Robert Caro describes how Robert Moses did this repeatedly in The Power Broker). Some "estimates aren't intended to be accurate; they are intended to sell the project."
The team doesn't have enough experience so they can't anticipate that similar problems will show up as happened on previous similar projects. If you've never built an underground train before, you won't know to keep replacement parts for the digging machine ordered in advance.
The stories are numerous and detailed in here. I was also pleased by how many echoes I found with my other reading. I'd read about the building of the Pentagon and the chaos of the the early building of it. So much was done so fast, but so much had to be redone. I'd listened to the 99pi/Cautionary Tales episode about the building of the Sydney Opera house and how it ruined the architect, who fled the country and never saw it completed. I'm reading Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" and it's a great peek behind the scenes to see how and why the author thought his 8 years of research/writing would only take a year.
This book was a big eye-opener for me, articulating things my experience had turned into instincts. I was able to use it before I even finished, referring engineers I work with to find "reference projects" to figure out timelines instead of doing the same things that didn't work for us and don't work for anyone else.
If you do things that take longer than a month, this is a pretty valuable book to read. If you do things that are new or haven't been done before, it's VERY interesting. I'm going to go on about this a lot to other folks about it.
One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and …
And they partied on a scale the New World had seldom seen, outdoing themselves with swimming pools bearing
thousands of orchids, diamond tiaras for lady guests, cigarettes
wrapped, and designed to be smoked, in hundred-dollar bills,
until an awed America named the North Shore "The GoldCoast."
And if their displays of wealth were awesome, so were their
displays of selfishness. The robber barons intended to keep their
world for themselves.
Just absolutely reviling these people, setting us up to side with Moses.
I have a feeling Caro comes back to this - I know he will show us that after beating the powerful Moses is not going to shy away from turning his power on the poor that he considers beneath the value of his aesthetic
One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and …
the men who, building their empires on the
toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours
long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up
in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's "Law? What do I care
for law? Hain't I got the power?" and J. P. Morgan's "I owe the
public nothing."
I love what Caro is doing here. The antagonists to Moses are real SOBs.
We get to understand how they get the land that will be stolen back from them. The devil fighting the devil. And the outcomes are the beautiful parks I get to go to.
The secrets to successfully planning and delivering projects on any scale—from home renovation to space …
Wow - the simple concepts here are really powerful and obvious when laid out like this.
Loved to see mentions of other things I've learned or am learning about, like the construction of the Pentagon building, Robert Caro's writing of The Power Broker, the Sydney Opera House construction, the Pixar process and then see it broken down into issues of poor estimation, lack of a reference class for estimation, starting too soon and lack of modular small pieces - spending too long in Long Arcs rather than little loops of iteration. This book rang like a bell for me.
