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I promised a few weeks ago to get back to some of my formative experiences as a software developer and a project manager. One of these experiences was a project called the Skycam. One night on that project I learned the power of leadership.

You can see the Skycam on Monday Night Football each week. The Skycam is an overhead camera system that is run with four computer-driven winches. The current sophisticated system is a far cry from the version I coded up in my basement on a Z80 processor.

It started because a friend of a friend knew this inventor who had an idea. Garrett Brown is the inventor of the Steadicam and the Skycam. He is a gifted film director and camera operator, a voice talent, and a very funny guy. He is a man who thinks a lot about cameras and points of view, especially after his academy award success with the Steadicam. And he had the Idea that a camera hanging on a ring suspended from four wires, and actuated by four computer-controlled winches, could move freely in a large three-dimensional space. Such a camera would provide unique moving and overhead views.

To do this, he needed many new things to come together – wireless camera controls, gyro stabilization, fiber optics, transformer-free power management, and computer-controlled winches. My part was the user interface to control the winches, and fly the camera.

And indeed, there were many components and technologies that had to come together to make the whole system work. And the goal was a big one – to debut this new system at the Olympics.

Along about early January, things looked bleak. We had redesigned every major component of the system (camera, stabilizing spar, RF control, power systems, new winches, new central control console, new computer, and new software) from the earlier prototype. We had yet to integrate all the components and to do our first system test, and the Winter Olympics were four weeks away.