Zach on Leadership

I recently gained some new responsibilities at work. In addition to leading the core infrastructure teams, I now also lead application development. Having Development and Operations under a single leader is trending right now, and I’m very excited for the opportunity to be on-point for our DevOps transformation at CHS. As I’ve discussed previously in this blog, I came up through the technical ranks on the infrastructure side before going into leadership. To date, I’ve spent my entire career indirectly supporting…

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There is something about my upbringing in public education that made me feel like I needed to be well-rounded. Some skills came easy. Others took more concerted effort. Rather than spend time developing my strengths, I often felt like I need to spend all of my spare energy shoring up my weaknesses. A well-leveled report card was always the goal. If something was falling, that’s where my focus went. This, of course, was the explicit intention of public education. The…

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Every leader is at the core an agent of change. If you are just maintaining or running your group, you are a manager. Leadership implies change. Changing people isn’t easy, especially if you want to do it without coercion or authoritative power. How do you go about initiating change? Well, let’s look at how Obi-Wan Kenobi did it in Star Wars, A New Hope. Some background information Luke is a rural farm boy, who is being raised by his Uncle Owen….

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It’s no secret that many in the technology field grew up reading comic books and carried their superhero fascination well into adulthood. What once was exclusively the realm of geeks has slowly made its way into the mainstream in the form of a constant stream of blockbuster movies. I love many of the superhero stories, and their resonance with real life in the trenches of enterprise technology work. In this blog article, I will derive the technology leadership lessons from…

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