Customer Reviews

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

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The principles that this book discusses: Release, Collaboration Ensemble and Play are extremely relevant to creating effective software teams. The principles are inspired by observing how theatre companies work, but they also have a basis in lean manufacturing. If you work as a software developer or manager and have ever worked on a theatre production (community theatre or at school) a light will go on immediately. If you haven't The data that the authors provide about lean manufacturing practices and software development will convince you that there is a lot that we can learn from this metaphor. The theatre examples will be helpful in explaining how the principles work if you need to communicate them to a manager who does not understand software development. Buy this book and place it along side your books on agile software development; you will want to read it and refer back to it frequently.

For those who need to innovate in a world of change, reduced cycle times, and demanding customers. Austin and Devin provide a management framework for delivering innovation reliably and effectively. Concepts in the book--Artful Making, Reconceiving, Low cost iteration, and working on the Edge--all resonate with my experiences in the Agile Software Development movement. "Artful Making" will go on my must read list!

"Artful Making" is a great book. Before reading it, and even into its first few chapters, I was under the impression the book was aimed mainly at midlevel management of medium-to-large corporations:a large group, to be sure, but one to which I do not happen to belong. But I was mistaken . . .
I soon realized that the key qualities of release-collaboration-ensemble-play can fit any setting where individuals or groups of people want to create something valuable. What Austin and Devin are talking about is developing a process and a result that unite in a never-ending productive cycle, where each "iteration" is different, but yet a necessary prelude to what follows. We can all benefit, because we all have the same need to stay away from the "staleness" and complacency that can be so deadly to personal and professional growth. "Artful Making" will help you find the way.
I recommend the book completely. Read it over and over and keep a pencil handy for special passages!

I have had the privilege of studying under Prof. Rob Austin, and I this book continues the dialogue that has always informed Rob's intellectual search--how do two seemingly disparate disciplines, in this case theater production and knowledge based business, converge to inform processes that are virtually identical thus providing a path where each can improve the results of the other.

Both he and Lee Devin have written a concise, powerfully convincing narrative that offers a new approach on how to manage complexity, embrace ambiguity and uncertainty and innovate reliably under strict deadlines. Managing "release", rapid iterative development, and creating the right "ensemble" are some of the key concepts explored in the book.

Highly recommended for anyone presented with the challenges of how to innovate and perform reliably under deadlines.

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 focus
on 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"?

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 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.

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?

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.

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.