Bent Flyvbjerg was the first BT Professor of Major Programme Management at Saïd Business School and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne’s College. He held the post until September 2021.
Bent Flyvbjerg works for better management of megaprojects and cities. He is the most cited scholar in the world on megaprojects. He is #1 on each of Google Scholar's global-citation ranking lists in: Project Management, Planning, Infrastructure and Cities.
Flyvbjerg is the author or editor of 10 books and 200+ papers, translated into 20 languages. He has pioneered research in behavioural science, including the influence of power on rationality, strategic misrepresentation, optimism bias, the planning fallacy, and reference class forecasting. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls Flyvbjerg's work on reference class forecasting and how to deal with the planning fallacy, 'the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting' (Thinking, Fast and Slow). Flyvbjerg also writes about the philosophy and methodology of social science, and especially phronesis.
Flyvbjerg is founder and co-founder of a dozen highly successful research groups, degree programmes, and startups. He loves building new ventures from scratch, securing their success academically, professionally, and/or commercially.
He has received numerous honours and awards, including a knighthood and two Fulbright Scholarships.
Flyvbjerg's research has been covered by Nature, Science, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, China Daily, The BBC, CNN, National Geographic, etc. He is a frequent commentator in the news.
He has 30 years of experience as an adviser to government and business, including the US, UK, and Chinese governments and Fortune 500 companies. He is an external advisor to McKinsey & Co. He has worked on some of the largest projects in the world, on all aspects from front-end planning, delivery, and postmortems to rescue of failing projects. He advises ministers, boards, and C-suites on how to deliver their projects successfully.
Flyvbjerg is chairman of Oxford Global Projects.