Gorilla in the Cockpit - Paperback

by Thomas D. Zweifel (Author), Vip Vyas (Author)

Whether you lead a company, a project or your life, Gorilla in the Cockpit is a smart investment.
-Scott A. Snook, Professor, Harvard Business School

Open the Megaproject Black Box and Avoid Billion-Dollar Disasters

Despite decades of analysis, thousands of reports, myriad methodologies, and countless experts, major and megaprojects (those over $1 billion) and change initiatives keep failing, Why?

Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the Black Box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.

Highly valuable for our executive board and 150 direct reports in transforming the mindset, communication, and strategic outlook in a way that led to real-world results.
-Wolfgang Pitz, CEO, SpaceTech; ex-Space Program Manager, Airbus Defense & Space

Gorilla in the Cockpit doesn't stop at diagnostics and explanations. It offers a solution based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and behavioral economics, with practical application to real-life projects. Its systematic framework encompasses all steps of leading and managing megaprojects, from design to procurement, stakeholder management to execution, and handover to sustainability.

Learn how to:

• Challenge how you see, approach, and lead megaprojects-and massive change programs in your organizations.
• Expose the hidden human patterns that destroy billions (and trillions) of shareholder value and taxpayer money each year.
• Show a revolutionary way of understanding what happens in the project Black Box and why this drives 65% failure rates.
• Explode the myth that major project failure is inevitable.
• De-Risk your project flight path and boost your project success rate.

Gorilla in the Cockpit is a rare look behind the scenes of megaprojects by two seasoned experts. If you want to understand what really goes on in big projects, why they fail so often and what it takes for them to succeed, this book is a must-read.
-Bent Flyvbjerg, professor at Oxford and Copenhagen, principal author of How Big Things Get Done and Megaprojects and Risk.