My professor and mentor, Donald F. Othmer (1904-1995), was a project manager who made a difference. Humble and unassuming, Othmer attained many a distinction. From 1947 to 1954, he was my teacher at the Brooklyn Poly, later Polytechnic University of New York, and it was truly a rare privilege to work with him.
|
33 Years of Volunteer ImpactbyThinking about volunteering? A longtime practitioner reflects on her 33-year journey that began after attending her first conference in 1992. Through her many roles, she gained invaluable skills, friendships, and opportunities, and encourages others to make a meaningful impact. |
|
Caregiving as Project Management: How Life’s Most Personal Responsibility Strengthened a PMbyCaregiving is adaptive project management in its rawest form. Uncertainty is not the exception; it is the baseline. This practitioner shares how caregiving helped strengthen her PM skills. |
Enterprise Agility Executive Voices Series: Terence MauribyAs part of the development of the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility, PMI spoke with a range of executive leaders to gather insights on what enterprise agility looks like in practice. Here, Terence Mauri shares how to rethink operating models. |
I was also fortunate to correspond with Don till the early 1990s. I have scores of his distinctive handwritten letters in handwritten envelopes. In the 1980s, Don and his charming wife Mildred visited our home in Mumbai twice for dinner. Our chat was so informal that you could never even dream that he was a billionaire. (See below.) But that’s a different story fit for a full-length book.
Born in 1904 in Omaha, Nebraska, Don thought, at the age of three, that the “swaying of trees caused the wind!” Soon after, Don surmised, that in his polka dot shirt, “the black fabric had been chemically treated to remove color…leading to the more rapid deterioration of the fabric comprising the dots.” At the age of ten, Don started working his way through school by delivering papers. Soon, he deduced the Pythagorean theorem while trying to cross a vacant lot via the shortest distance. The son of a sheet metal worker, Don started tinkering in his father's shop and developed considerable skill in both wood- and metalworking, and progressed later even to glassblowing. Hundreds of such mini-projects in his childhood must have prepared Don, as he grew up, to tackle major and even mega-projects, including the now famous Othmer still (a glass device used to study the properties of mixtures undergoing distillation). Don had the great knack of combining chemical, mechanical and managerial skills, especially with some of his major projects later in his career.
Perhaps the most recognized chemical engineer of the twentieth century, Don was an exceptional teacher, researcher and inventor. Following the lead of an almost unheard of amateur investment advisor, Warren Buffett, to the letter, Don was able to amass an estate of nearly two billion dollars. Fortunately and appropriately, the fortune went entirely to worthy charities, including over $175 million for the Polytechnic, and a lot more to hospitals. Early in life, Don and his wife were also active in hospital-connected social work.
I fondly remember in the 1970s and 1980s walking with Don to his nearby Brooklyn Heights home for a sumptuous lunch. It was difficult to keep pace with him. During one of these walks, Don described his typical morning walk to the office via the hospital, in the form of a triangle.
One of Don’s most ambitious projects was editing the twenty-odd volumes of the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (ECT), a compilation of the work of hundreds of authors on specialized subjects. This was conceived of and completed during my student days at the Poly. The authors for various chapters were hand picked by Don from among his friends and colleagues throughout the world, but mostly in the USA. Considerable coordination was required, and I helped him out with the ECT and its later editions.
In 1961, Don was appointed as a distinguished professor and also emerged as a worldwide consultant, fusing his academic brilliance with his hands-on experience in diverse fields. If that isn’t stellar project management, then what is?
Stay tuned! This series of article will continue, and there is much more to come!
About the Author
A chemical engineer and management guru, Dr. O.P. (“Om”) Kharbanda teaches at the Bajaj (Management), Indian Institute of Technology, Powai (India) and at Rushmore University (PhD in Management program). Students worldwide use his 29 finance and management books as reference works. Nearly half of these titles relate to project management. Dr. Kharbanda has over a half century of experience on projects in the USA, United Kingdom, and particularly in the Middle East and his native country of India. If you have questions and comments about this article, or are a project manager in need of encouragement and wisdom, please email Om at mailto:[email protected].
|
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and, if they can't find them, make them." - George Bernard Shaw |
