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

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.

Rob Austin is Professor of Technology and OperationsManagement at Harvard Business School where his research focuses on the changing nature of work. His experience includes a decade with Ford Motor Company; from 2000 to 2001, while on leave from Harvard, he served as a senior executive for a new division of a leading technology company, helping to establish a new organization and technology platform. He is author of Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, and co-author of Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age, and Corporate Information Strategy and Management. A Cutter Technology Council Fellow, Dr. Austin holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.

Lee Devin, Professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College and dramaturg for the People’s Light and Theatre Company, has more than 30 years of experience in the theater. He has won prizes and grants for play scripts, librettos, and translations that have been published or performed worldwide. As an Equity actor, his roles have ranged from Malvolio in Twelfth Night to Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire. He has been a visiting consultant or artist in residence at Columbia University, the Folger Library, Ball State University, the Banff School of the Arts, University of California San Diego, Bucknell University, and the Minnesota Opera. Dr. Devin holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University.