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Leonardo da Vinci: The Project Manager’s PM
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
Looking for inspiration and a role model all in one brilliant package? Over the past two centuries there have been hundreds of superstar candidates to choose from. They include Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and a long list of technology giants from IBM’s Thomas Watson and Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Apple’s Steve Jobs, to name only a few.
While all brilliant innovators in their own right, they pale in comparison with Leonardo da Vinci, who died at age 67 in 1519.
Da Vinci epitomized the Renaissance man. He was an engineer, artist, mathematician, technologist, musician, astronomer, philosopher and military weapons designer (creating the first machine gun, hand grenade, missile and tank).
But da Vinci also holds the distinction of being a pioneer project manager centuries before the job title was even coined. He designed bridges, aqueducts, water well drills, and street lighting and pulley systems, to name a few.
Like PMs today, he created intricate plans, schematics and scale drawings that left nothing to chance. Then he went out and found backers (stakeholders) to fund the initial stages of his inventions so he could build prototypes.
We could learn a thing or two from a man who lived 500 years ago, and not just from his extraordinary inventions. Writer Michael Gelb certainly did. The …
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