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

Artful Making and the Customer

This aspect of artful making, that its products are never fin-

ished, complicates our usual way of thinking about relation-

ships with customers. In industrial settings, we usually fulfill

our obligation by delivering, for an agreed-upon price, a final

product that is useful in a way the customer expects. But what

does it mean to never be done with the product, never to com-

plete a project so that the customer can “sign off on it?” In

Chapter 10, we’ll fully address questions of how you budget

and pay for artful making, given that it has this “never done”

characteristic; for now we note that artful making forces us to