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

Artful Making

Turns Industrial

Notions of

Control Upside

Down

Artful making strives to realize fully the benefits of

workers’ talents and skills. It calls on us to recognize individ-

ual differences among workers and to acknowledge the impor-

tance of group chemistry. It stresses reliance on conversation

and other informal modes of interaction over the use of docu-

ments and formal mechanisms. It’s antithetical to purely ana-

lytical approaches that equate people with interchangeable

units of labor. Where you find artful making, you find people

working on the same tasks together, as rough equals or as

apprentices and masters. You find people doing many things ...