Artful Making What Managers Need to Know about How Artists Work

Name: Artful Making What Managers Need to Know about How Artists Work
Price: 2.82 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780130086952

ISBN-10: 0130086959

ISBN-13: 9780130086952

Edition: 2003

Authors: Robert Austin, Lee Devin

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IntroductionManaging When You Don't Know Where You're Going If you don't know where you're going, any mapwill do. 1 Thisconventional wisdom sounds right to many managers. It highlights the safety ofhaving a clear objective for your management actions. It implies that allmanagement actions are likely to be confused and inefficient if you don'thave a clear objective. If you don't have a good fix on yourdestination-be it a product or service, a strategic or competitiveoutcome, or anything else-you may as well not start the journey.For a lot of your work, though, this so-called wisdom iswrong. Why? For one thing, you can't always know your destination inadvance. Whether you're designing a new… product, running a business involatile conditions, operating a process that might encounter unforeseeninputs, or just trying to figure out what to do with your life, the journeyusually involves exploration, adjustment, and improvisation. Situations inwhich you don't or can't know the results in advance are common andconsequential. All businesses face them.If you're not too narrow in what you're willingto call "management," you can manage these situations. You canenhance effectiveness and efficiency, and you can improve the likelihood ofvaluable outcomes. However, the methods you'll use will differ from, andsometimes conflict with, methods that work when you do know where you'regoing.There is an increasingly important category ofwork-knowledge work-that you can best manage by not enforcing adetailed, in-advance set of objectives, even if you could. Often in this kindof work, time spent planning what you want to do will be better spent actuallydoing (or letting others in your charge do), trying something you haven'tthought out in detail so you can quickly incorporate what you learn from theexperience in the next attempt. In appropriate conditions-only inappropriate conditions-you can gain more value from experience than fromup-front analysis. In certain kinds of work, even if you can figure out whereyou're going and find a map to get you there, that may not be the bestthing to do.Forging ahead without detailed specifications to guide youobviously requires innovation, new actions. We take this observation one stepfurther by suggesting that knowledge work, which adds value in large partbecause of its capacity for innovation, can and often should be structured asartists structure their work. Managers should look to collaborative artistsrather than to more traditional management models if they want to createeconomic value in this new century.We call this approach artful making. "Artful,"because it derives from the theory and practice of collaborative art andrequires an artist-like attitude from managers and team members."Making," because it requires that you conceive of your work asaltering or combining materials into a form, for a purpose. 2 Materials thus treated become something new, something they would not becomewithout the intervention of a maker. This definition usually points to workthat changes physical materials, iron ore and charcoal into steel, forinstance. But the work and management we're considering don'talways do that. Instead they mostly operate in imagination, in the realm ofknowledge and ideas. While artful making improves any thing that exhibitsinterdependency among its parts, we're not primarily concerned withheating metal and beating it into shapes. We're more concerned withstrategies, product designs, or software-new things that groups create bythinking, talking, and collaborating. Artful Making Any activity that involves creating something entirely newrequires artful making. Whenever you have no blueprint to tell you in detailwhat to do, you must work artfully. A successful response to an unexpected moveby a competitor requires artful activity; so does handling a sudden problemcaused by a supplier. An artful manager operates without

Book details

List price: $24.95
Copyright year: 2003
Publisher: FT Press
Publication date: 4/28/2003
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Size: 6.25" wide x 9.50" long x 1.00" tall
Weight: 1.232
Language: English



Foreword


Introduction



What's Really Different About Knowledge Work


Artful and Industrial Making in Action


Realizing the Importance of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems


Rolling Out Web Technology at Ford Motor Company


Comparing Sun and Ford


Streetcar at the People's Light and Theatre Company


Comparing Sun and People's Light


The Four Qualities of Artful Making (An Artful Framework)


Understanding Artful Making



Artful Making Relies on Emergence


The People's Light Way of Working


Not Quite Experiment, Not Quite Discovery


Exploration and Efficiency


Emergence in Business



Artful Making is Iterative, Not Sequential


Auto Making: Mostly Industrial


Software Making at Trilogy: Mostly Artful


The Iterative Structure of Play Production


The Script Is Not the Play, Nor Is It a Specification


The Writer's View of the Script


Rehearsal Process


Agile Software Development


Artful Making in Software Development and Theatre


Iteration as a Structure for Rigorous Work



The Prerequisite Conditions for Artful Making


Artful Making Isn't Always the Best Approach


Reconfiguration Costs


Exploration Costs


The General Applicability of Artful Making


The Role of Enabling Technologies in Reducing the Cost of Iteration


Reducing Reconfiguration Costs: Software Development


Reducing Exploration Costs: Simulation, Prototyping, and Version Control


When Artful and Industrial Making Are Combined


How Competitive Forces Drive Work Toward Artfulness


A Common Problem: Imposing Industrial Costs on Potentially Artful Processes


The Historical Evolution of Artful Making Prerequisites



Artful Making as Part of the Shift to a Knowledge Economy


Ancient Making


An Armory on the River Severn


The Costs and Benefits of Ancient Making


Toward Industrial Making


Industrial Making


Eli Whitney


Henry Ford


Frederick Winslow Taylor


The Evolution of Sequential Processes


Toward Artful Making


Artful Making


Learning to Make Artfully



Artful Making Turns Industrial Notions of Control Upside Down


Managing People Who Are Smarter Than You Are


Supervision in an Industrial Context


Management in an Artful Context


Some New Realities of Management


Control in Artful Making


Physical Release


Mind Release and Focus


Sir Alec Guinness and the Challenge of Control by Release


The Director's/Manager's Artful Lever: Focusing the Group


Saving Apollo 13: Gene Kranz as Ensemble Director


The Director's/Manager's Source of Authority


The Precision of Control by Release


Control by Release



Artful Making Reconceives; Industrial Making Replicates


Reconceiving Hamlet


Reconceiving to Recover Apollo 13


The Differences Between Reconceiving and Replicating


The Capabilities of Reconceiving and Replicating


Artful Making and the Customer


Never-Done, Constantly Improving Development


REconceiving versus Compromising


Artful Collaboration



Artful Making Requires a Secure Workspace


Securing the Workspace


Edmondson's "Psychological Safety" Concept


Security Beyond the Workspace


Creative Interchange


Working on Your "Edge"


Finding a Physical Edge


Learning to Work on Your Edge


Ego versus Vanity: Giving up Sovereignty over Your Work


Making an Ensemble


Two Kinds of Reality


A Whole Greater than the Sum of its Parts



Artful Making Embraces Uncertainty Instead of Protecting Against It


McDonald's French Fries, Varidus Cattle, and Urgent Customer Orders


Artful Making Doesn't Protect Against Uncertainty


Improvisation


Building Improvisational Capability: Being in "Present Time"


Improvisation and Control


Artful Making and Interdependency


The Emergent Final Purpose



Artful Making is Fiscally Responsible


Deadlines and Reliable Innovation


Funding Emergent Projects: A Venture-Based Approach


Staging


Incentive Alignment and Risk Sharing


"People, People, People"


Fiscal Responsibility in Artful Making



Artful Management


Managing Convergence and Emergence


Essential Themes


Artful Management Signposts


The Artful Making Qualities


The Four Qualities


Release


Collaboration


Ensemble


Play


Relationships Among Qualities


A Director on Management



A Final Word


A Last Look at the Theatre


Bibliography


Acknowledgements


Index