Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

I've had very great expectations about this book. This was mainly because of Rob Austin's genius earlier work (measuring and managing performance). Unfortunately, even though the book was quite book, I found myself disappointed. This book was not as good as the measuring and managing one.Artful making is making a comparison between several different ways of creating products and divides them into industrial and artful. Examples of artful making in the book are theatre production and also agile software development. Then from that perspective, the book looks at several aspects of artful making and tries to describe qualities about artful making that can help managers create such an environment. The book describes these qualities in rather abstract terms and names them release, ensemble, collaboration and play.Personally I felt the comparison in the book was a too big simplification. Of course, theatre production and software development can learn from each other, but still in the end of the book, I was not really convinced that they are artful making while the other product creating methods are industrial making. The book takes then a lot of (interesting) examples from e.g. Apollo flights and puts them in the category artful, though to me some of the comparisons were not clear or obvious at all.All in all, I DID enjoy the book and found it useful reading. I've rated it 3 stars because I would rate "measuring and managing" as 5 stars and this is book was clearly not as good. 3 starts, in this case, does mean that the book is still a recommended reading and it does provide interesting insights and stories.

This book talks about what it terms Artful Making in comparison with what it terms Industrial Making. In the industrial making world, products are planned before their made. In the artful making world, products are allowed to emerge. The authors make the point that if you don't know exactly what you're going to build, the Artful approach makes more sense. In order to be successful, you need to drastically lower the cost of iterating (i.e., trying new stuff).That sounds a lot like agile development and the authors draw on examples from that community (along with the theater community, Deming, and other examples that are from the emergent rather than planned side of the fence) to make their case.The points made in this book resontated with me but I've been in many situations where the culture will be a barrier to implementing these ideas. The question I had after reading this book was how to get from where most of the organizations I've been exposed to are to the state this book proposes?

This is one of the most insightful business books i've ever read. Most management books are about, well, management: how do you control individuals so that they toe the line, follow the rules and do what they're told and, somehow... get results. We can all feel that having an army of human robots doing their paperwork somehow isn't conducive to great business prowesses. This book explores the true nature of thinking outside the box, without falling into the trap of lala-land. Key concepts of ITERATIONS (learning by doing), EDGE (stretching ourselves out of the comfort zone), RELEASE (liberating intuition within a set process, such as actor's interpretation of written lines), and ENSEMBLE (building a coherent whole by capitalizing on individual's individuality) offer a framework for a different, dynamic, management. fter a second reading, I find myself mulling about many of this book's ideas, and how they apply to everyday management situations. Certainly a must read for anyone in the business field.

I recommend this book to everyone involved in making both physical and things and especially knowledge-based work such as software engineering.At the outset, I opened the book expecting some encouragement for software development managers like me to be a little more... theatrical in the way we approach projects. I was a little concerned that the single focuson one theatre group would wear little thin. But the authors draw on a rich seam of of other sources, introduce well-reasoned arguments and examples, and show both the limitations of their approach and counter-arguments. I'm convinced, more.than ever, that we need to learn a lot about artful making as the knowledge revolution progresses. Just need to work on the rest of my team... or should I say "cast"?

In 2006 I met Kent Beck at a conference and asked him how XP could work at startups. He said read 'Artful Making' and I wasn't disappointed. Software delivery and creative endevors like putting on plays have a lot in common.Both have hard deadlines.Both have fixed budgets.And both are highly dependendant on the actors they get.This book is written for software managers to show how other industries manage the creative process, yet still deliver a great product within these constraints. This is one of my favorite Agile books, and the foreword by Eric Schmidt of Google alone is worth the read.

Insightful on how arts is useful for business and teams

this book made me really think about how things were being done at work. Every manager should read this book instead of those famous self-help-for-managers-book

This work makes the profound assertion that artistic intelligence is valuable to the business world today. What's more, the assertion is put forth cogently, coherently and credibly. Bravo and bravissimo!