Bring me Problems, not Solutions

Bring me Problems, not Solutions

There’s a meme circulating on the internet called the bell curve meme, or the midwit meme. It points out funny things that newbies do, compared to the prevailing wisdom of the masses, compared to the insight of the experts. The joke is that the experts often mirror the newbies. I haven’t seen the meme applied to technology leadership, but I thought I’d give it a try. “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions,” says the leader, feeling smart, strong, and…

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What’s the Difference Between a Director and a Vice President?

What’s the Difference Between a Director and a Vice President?

Eight years ago when I started Zach on Leadership, some of my first blog articles were about helping people advance in their careers. I love techies. I’m one of them. I spent years of my career as a technician and engineer. Then I advanced and started climbing the corporate ladder. I truly believe that techies make the best technology leaders, but few of them are equipped to succeed in leadership. That’s where I come in. I detailed the pathway that…

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Reimagining the Buy vs. Build Process

Reimagining the Buy vs. Build Process

One of the most fundamental questions a tech executive must answer is, should we buy or build our software solutions? On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward question, but it can get complicated in a hurry. The basic line of reasoning works like this: Is there a commercial solution that meets my needs? If so, I should probably buy it, because why would I reinvent the wheel? That would be dumb. On the other hand, if I have…

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The Balancing Act of Innovation and Operations

The Balancing Act of Innovation and Operations

Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook with the motto, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Eventually, they abandoned that motto after they broke a few too many things. I relate to this struggle more than most. Some lean more toward operational stability. Some lean more toward disruptive innovation. I’m squarely in the uncomfortable middle. Operations I’ve been accountable for operations my whole career. Twice now, I’ve been explicitly hired into a company because they really needed some operational rigor. Things were breaking…

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Leadership Lessons from Volunteering for Extra Work

Leadership Lessons from Volunteering for Extra Work

Last week, I shared some leadership lessons from our company’s response to the global outage caused by a CrowdStrike update. Upon further reflection, there is an additional lesson to be shared. If you missed last week’s article go back and read it, then continue on here. After the initial recovery of our critical workloads, we took stock of the enormous job ahead of us to recover a large number of individual end-user computers spread across the globe. By then, we…

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The Day 8.5 Million Computers Died

The Day 8.5 Million Computers Died

I awoke on Friday, July 19th to a phone full of missed calls and texts. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I went to my work computer, and jiggled my mouse to wake it up, only to see the blue screen of death. I returned the calls and quickly got up to speed on the technical carnage impacting the planet. Some of you never heard of CrowdStrike before last Friday, but most of us in enterprise technology know it well….

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Servant Leadership Isn’t for Wimps

Servant Leadership Isn’t for Wimps

If you’ve been following Zach on Leadership for any amount of time, you know that I’m all about servant leadership. It’s a regular theme on this blog. If you’d like an overview of my views on servant leadership, check out this article. I’m in favor of it because it yields such good outcomes for everyone involved. The employees win, the customers win, and the leaders win. There aren’t any downsides. Yet, some still resist this leadership philosophy. Some argue that…

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The Meeting Cascade: A Small Tweak to Improve Communication Speed and Cross-team Collaboration

The Meeting Cascade: A Small Tweak to Improve Communication Speed and Cross-team Collaboration

Don’t you love it when you find a small tweak that makes a big difference? That always feels like a win because so much of what we do requires tremendous effort and the benefits are not always realized. We experienced one of these low-effort, high-reward changes this past year, and I thought I’d share our insights. Problem #1: Like many organizations, we rely on the timely cascade of relevant, contextualized information. Discussions at the executive level get shared with the…

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Can You Really Take a Two-week Vacation?

Can You Really Take a Two-week Vacation?

I just got back from a two-week vacation. A common reaction I get is, “Wow. How did you pull that off?” I didn’t always do this. I started taking 2-3 week vacations annually about 9 years ago. The thing that triggered it was the purchase of an RV for our family of six. Sure, you can take your RV out for a weekend, and we do, but if you really want to use it for what it’s capable of, you…

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Leadership Lessons from Seeing the Northern Lights through a Camera Lens

Leadership Lessons from Seeing the Northern Lights through a Camera Lens

This past weekend, the world got one of the best-ever looks at the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. Personally, I was in northern Minnesota at the time. I forgot my DSLR camera at home but managed to snap some decent shots with my iPhone. I took in the beautiful sights with several friends, who were also feverishly taking photos of the sky with their phones. This is what I experienced last weekend. Many of you probably experienced something similar:…

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