Today marks the one year anniversary of Zach on Leadership. I’d like to thank all of my readers for engaging with me, encouraging me, and spreading the word. This started off as a wild experiment, and has now become an important part of how I communicate my ideas and influence the greater IT community. I’d like to briefly revisit the mission for this blog. My tag line in my logo says it all: “Better Leaders in Enterprise Technology.” Enterprise Technology…
This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership at the University of Missouri. CHS was among 22 agricultural cooperatives at the institute. Working for CHS, the largest agricultural cooperative, has taught me many things over the past two years. Due to my back-office role in enterprise technology, I only had basic knowledge of the history, purpose, and challenge of the cooperative business model. Spending a week with colleagues from cooperatives around the world, academic…
The Setup Most technologists start their careers as generalists. This is often how educational programs are built. They are designed to expose learners to a variety of relevant technologies to make students relatively versatile to the needs of the marketplace. Even if your educational background is specialized, often entry level positions in enterprise technology are general in nature. Help Desk professionals solve a variety of end-user problems. Operations professionals handle the entire gamut of IT systems support. Junior Developers often…
I was recently looking over my LinkedIn profile, and I noticed that my most-endorsed skill is “Disaster Recovery.” It’s interesting because I’ve made no attempt in my career to make myself known as the Disaster Recovery guru go-to-guy, but alas, it looks like that’s exactly what I am most well-known for. After thinking about it a little more, I realized that Disaster Recovery really has been a big part of my career, and I’ve hardly written anything about it. Thus,…