Worth reading, though not as good as measuring.

books:


	• Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (Financial Times Prentice Hall Books.) Robert Austin, Lee Devin FT Press, 2003 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Worth reading, though not as good as measuring.

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.

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Reconceive your engineered perceptions!

Austin and Devin present a truly innovative approach to help us in the software industry to reconceive our traditionally engineered world. I have a bias toward metaphors and this one really hit home. It not only brings out the soft-science (human) side of developing software, it helps displace the perceptions that artful productions are anything but a disciplined, impeccable process requiring as much, or more, business aptitude than software development to be successful.

If you are in the software development industry and have, as I have had, pre-conceived notions of how artists create and innovate, this book is a must read. If you have been using agile development methods, it will open your eyes to why those methods are successful. If you have used more traditional methods, or are skeptical toward agile methods, this book will enlighten you toward an industry that has been using such agile methods for centuries.

Finally, and most importantly, this book highlights the creative and innovation process. Many in the software development industry struggle with how to create innovation, typically stumbling over it if you are lucky. This book will guide you through how you can use innovation techniques in your company and teams to build innovative products. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to improve their organizations' innovative capabilities.

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Building Bridges

We have this tendency, understandable but at times pernicious, to bracket the world off, to make compartments for our relatively unexamined opinions. One of the worst examples of this is the notion that individuals in the arts and folks in business have nothing to offer one another: artists squander resources and are fundamentally dysfunctional when it comes to practical matters; business people care only about the bottom-line and apply an industrial model to whatever they do. In their book, Artful Making, Lee Devin and Rob Austin frustrate this kind of thinking and in doing so open up new lines of communication and cooperation amongst individuals who actually have much to offer one another. In creating these bridges, Artful Making offers readers a fundamentally generous view of human experience as evidenced by its key terms - collaboration, ensemble, release, play.

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Artful vs. Industrial

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?

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Nothing new here

The book goes into great lengths into comparing business and theatre. Concepts of rapid iteration, small groups and "playing" are mentioned in the book.

No new concepts... they just went deep into the comparisons. The read is a bit boring.

reviews: page 1, 2

Artful Making offers the first proven, research-based framework for engineering ingenuity and innovation. This book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and leading theatre director and playwright Lee Devin. Together, they demonstrate striking structural similarities between theatre artistry and production and today's business projects--and show how collaborative artists have mastered the art of delivering innovation "on cue," on immovable deadlines and budgets. These methods are neither mysterious nor flaky: they are rigorous, precise, and--with this book's help--absolutely learnable and reproducible. They rely on cheap and rapid iteration rather than on intensive up-front planning, and with the help of today's enabling technologies, they can be applied in virtually any environment with knowledge-based outputs. Moreover, they provide an overarching framework for leveraging the full benefits of today's leading techniques for promoting flexibility and innovation, from agile development to real options.

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