Zach on Leadership

Some people are natural negotiators and others are not. I fall into the latter category. I don’t enjoy buying cars, wheeling and dealing on Craigslist, or haggling with a street vendor when I’m on vacation in a developing country. All of these scenarios bring me significant stress and some degree of anxiety. My wife, Wendy, on the other hand, gets a huge thrill of adrenaline whenever she can talk a salesperson down to their bottom basement price. I’m glad I…

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In the world of enterprise technology there is a pecking order. It all comes down to who has domain admin rights, and who does not. I started my career working on a help desk and then eventually into desktop support. Early on, I wasn’t trusted with such rights, and I didn’t need them to do my job. Even though that made good sense for me to not have any more permissions than I needed, I still longed for that power….

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I recently finished reading every book Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. I started with The Tipping Point, then read Blink. Next I covered Outliers,  David and Goliath, and finally, What the Dog Saw. None of these books are explicitly about leadership or technology, but there was something about Gladwell’s writing that compelled me to consume more of it. About the time that I was finishing up What the Dog Saw, it dawned on me: Gladwell has a stark and unique ability…

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I am a blogger. 10 months ago, I wasn’t. This experience doesn’t make me an expert on the subject of blogging by any means, but more often than I would have expected, I’ve been asked for blogging advice. I thought I’d write this article to answer some of the common questions I get, and provide a few pointers and words of encouragement to those that are considering taking up blogging. Start with Why Blogging is a lot of work. You…

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In today’s world, it’s fashionable to model leadership success after companies like Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, and Netflix. In this blog article, I’m going to reach back and draw upon the leadership lessons from companies like Philip Morris, Circuit City, and Walgreens. Why on earth would I do that? About 15 years ago, I read the quintessential leadership book of its time: Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Since then, and the hundreds…

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You want to be a good leader. Being good means that you have quality ideas inside your head, but more importantly, it means you can easily assimilate ideas around you to arrive at quality decisions. This takes diversity of thought and an intentional act to surround yourself with people different from you. Leaders sometimes inherit leadership teams. Leaders also assemble leadership teams. I’ve been able to do both. How you go about that is critically important. “When two men in…

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It’s common knowledge that successful leaders protect and manage their time effectively. This isn’t an inspiring topic about how we can change the world. It’s a necessary topic for how we make time to do our world-changing stuff. The struggle to manage time is universal. We often know the work we need to do, but are nevertheless challenged to find the time to get it done. I’ve not perfected this, but I’ve learned some things over the years that have…

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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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