Author: Daniel snow

Why do large projects go over budget?

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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 and Dan Gardner, Currency, 2023 “There are three kinds of lies,” the old saying goes. “Lies, damned lies, and cost projections for big projects.” Yes, yes, the third item in the old saw is supposed to be statistics. But you, too, might feel the substitution appropriate if you’d just read How Big Things Get Done, an indispensable if perhaps unduly optimistic response to the tendency of modern projects, like California’s US$9 billion…

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Leap to leader: Make yourself heard

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For some, the leap to leader can be exhilarating, but for others, the freedom that comes with leadership can become overwhelming. The goal of my new book, The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership, is to provide a practical guide to making that transition. To assemble that guide, I’ve shared insights, stories, and approaches from hundreds of leaders whom I’ve interviewed and advised, and some whom I now work with. The result is a distillation of best practices encouraging those with leadership ambitions to build the skills they’ll need—starting with proving yourself as a manager,…

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A tale of two ways to think about climate change

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Mike Jakeman reviews Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind. The sweeping philosophical history argues that the world can be divided neatly into two camps: on one hand, there are “cornucopians,” who are convinced of the powers of human ingenuity to extend nature’s bounty to satisfy all of our desires; on the other are the “finitarians,” who see the planet’s resources and humankind’s power over them as limited, which means we must learn to compromise in order to thrive. Source link

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