The Leadership Habit

Chapter 6Encourages Excellence

Best known for painting Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci began his vocation as an apprentice. Classical European artists collectively produced much of the world's most renowned paintings, and to work as an apprentice of a master painter was considered the path to excellence. In the workshop of the Italian master artist, Andrea del Verrocchio, Da Vinci learned a range of technical skills that many today would not consider part of becoming a painter, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, plaster casting, mechanics, and carpentry—along with the artistic skills of drawing, sculpting, and painting. The great masters trained their apprentices to be knowledgeable in a variety of topics and skills not just by teaching but by doing.

Da Vinci was one of the pupils of Verrocchio. There were others, and we can learn from the way the master trained. The ways of developing young artists had been and was still at the time institutionalized in European society. In a master's workshop, the junior budding artists like Da Vinci were schooled in every step of the process, such as preparing pigments and canvases.

There is a lesson for business leaders in the way that classical artists developed the next generation of excellent painters. Although apprenticed painters studied the style and works of their masters, they also contributed to production. In the Renaissance era, when Verrocchio and Da Vinci both lived, masterpieces were often painted collaboratively. ...