I had a poignant moment out driving the other day when my young son asked me where all the South African flags had gone. “There were lots last week and now there are hardly any!” was his sorrowful remark.

 His observation summed up the melancholy that seems to have descended on South Africa in the aftermath of the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup. For a month, South Africans all pulled together; it was possible in a meaningful sense to talk about “us”, “our” country, how well “we” were doing.

 Now the love-in has well and truly ended and the focus is on “them” – the troublemakers, the people who make the Beloved Country feel sad. “Their” precise identity will vary according to your viewpoint (strikers, politicians, capitalists...), but the finger-pointing is universal.

 Unsurprisingly, a high-profile object of acrimony has been the World Cup itself – or rather, to be precise, its legacy. Apart from the word “vuvuzela” making it into the Oxford English Dictionary, it is now fashionable to say that the legacy of the big event is that there isn’t one.

 “They were never going to pay,” wrote Piet Coetzer in the Leadership Intelligence Bulletin on the World Cup stadiums, summing up the slagging off that the mega project is receiving now that everyone has woken up to the blindingly obvious.

 Nasty words such as “blame game”, “damage control” and “cost legacy” are used. The idiocy of expecting rugby to run with the football that Fifa dropped on South Africa is highlighted.

 But Coetzer reminds one (and one does need reminding) of “the broader context of the upgrading of the transport network to the centre of the city, the Fan Walk, the fact that Newlands is slap-bang in the middle of a mostly residential area, and the linking and proximity to the Waterfront and other major tourist attractions”.

 It is all about the big picture. The bigger – and vaguer – the better. That is often the way legacy works – once the project is handed over, the project manager walks away to the next project while the sponsor begins the task of autopersuasion. Yes, it really was worth spending all that money...

 Fortunately, in project management terms, the legacy of 2010 was not vague at all: in fact, it provided a lifetime’s worth of lessons all at once, several of which are analysed in the lead article of this edition.

 Enjoy the read!