Zach on Leadership

Isn’t it funny that we are so secretive about interviewing for jobs while currently employed? When we do it, we go into full stealth mode, so no one could possibly catch onto the fact that we are interviewing for jobs outside the company. Because, if they found out, the world would end, right? Probably not. Interview for jobs. Go ahead. It’s okay. I won’t be offended. I won’t think you are disloyal to the company. I do something pretty weird….

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I learned from the classic Disney movie Bug’s Life, that the first rule of leadership is “everything is your fault.” There’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s not a bad place to start. It’s all about accountability. I love working with people that accept responsibility and embrace accountability. Simply put, it’s really hard to work with the opposite. We’ve all had co-workers that are defensive by nature. It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction to accountability. When they are called…

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I had a great opportunity to be a guest on the The Schmidt List Podcast with Kurt Schmidt. We talked in-depth about IT Transformation. We covered career advancement, corporate politics, how to bring new ideas into an established team, data center migrations, innovation, Agile, DevOps, being a linchpin, and the future of digital business. All in one action packed episode. Listen to the episode on iTunes or Google Play Be sure to subscribe to the The Schmidt List Podcast for all around good…

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Technology is science. Art is art. Technology can’t be art, can it? Think about it. Technology fits into the left-brain activities of logic, reason, mathematics. Art is a right-brain thing, like creativity, music, expression, and feeling. When you go to college, you major in “the sciences” or “the arts.” Your Associate’s, Bachelor’s, or Master’s degree is in either Science or Arts, but not both. We even have special magnet schools that focus exclusively on STEM education, which stands for Science,…

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Bird migrations just happen naturally. Data center migrations… don’t. Few projects in IT are as big of a deal as a data center migration. This is one of the most complex, highest risk, and potentially disruptive things IT can do to a business. I’ve had the opportunity to do several data center migrations over my career, two of which in the past two years at CHS. Traditionally, data center migrations involve trucks. You dismantle systems in your old data center,…

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Fear I started my professional IT career in January of 1999, which was a fantastic time to start. The world was careening toward the ticking time bomb of Y2K, and IT budgets were infused with capital to squash the bug and usher technology-dependent enterprises into the new millennium. I don’t know first-hand how IT was run before 1999, but I saw evidence of it. IT wasn’t much of an enterprise function before then. Technology was a hodge-podge of unstandardized components,…

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