Zach on Leadership

Today, April 26th, is Alien Day. How is that? Well, if you are a fan of the Alien movie franchise, you know that the xenomorphs were first discovered on LV-426. 426 works out nicely to April 26th. In 1986, Aliens was released. It was a sequel to the 1979 movie, Alien. Aliens is one of those rare cases where the sequel is better than the original. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first watched Aliens, but I know for sure that I…

Read More Read More

I was having lunch with my family this past Sunday afternoon. Out of nowhere, my two oldest sons, Caleb, 13, and Nathan, 11, asked, “Dad, can we have 2FA?” You may be thinking that my kids are into IT and cybersecurity, but they aren’t. Because I was caught off guard and wanted to know if we were talking about what I thought we were talking about, I asked them, “What does 2FA stand for?” Caleb answered, “Two Factor Authorization.” “Close….

Read More Read More

About a month ago, CHS opened a new office in Lowertown, St. Paul. It was a new kind of office for us. We did it for a variety of reasons. One of the more interesting drivers was our desire to experiment. You can read all about the overall vision in my previous article on the subject. If you missed it, give it a quick read first, then continue on here. I’d like to use this article to dive into an…

Read More Read More

Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction. I picked up this week’s copy of Investor’s Business Daily and flipped to page A4. I saw myself quoted in a nationally-circulated newspaper for investment bankers and business leaders. The topic?  How to dress for success. Those that know me well, know that I was tragically born without a sense of fashion, so how did this possibly come to be? Getting discovered I’ve been blogging weekly for nearly three years now. I’d by…

Read More Read More

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of one of my all-time favorite movies, The Matrix. The post-apocalyptic cyberpunk style mixed with the philosophical depth and ground-breaking effects all add up to a monumental achievement. It’s influence on pop-culture remains ever-present today, which is shocking considering it was released 20 years ago. For a while after The Matrix’s release, it was popular to analogize just about anything and everything to it. So much, that what I’m about to do may be…

Read More Read More

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown. This was the most significant nuclear accident in US history. Fun Fact: I lived only 17 miles downwind from there. I was five months old. In case you were wondering where I got my superpowers, now you know. I was too young to remember what happened, but growing up, I heard about it all the time. For south-central Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island put us on the map….

Read More Read More

In the Star Wars universe, Jedi can use the Force to influence the weak-minded to comply with their will. The Jedi have a lot of cool Force powers, but this one tops the list as the coolest and most useful. It even has a name: the Jedi Mind Trick. The most well-known use of this power is in Star Wars: A New Hope when Obi-Wan Kenobi uses the Jedi Mind Trick on some imperial troopers at a checkpoint. If it’s…

Read More Read More

Last week, I shared with all of you that I was leaving behind the traditional world of offices and cubicles to try something new. I am excited to share the story of how a simple question turned into an idea, and then quickly became a reality. Necessity is the mother of invention CHS is in the process of remodeling our corporate office building. That’s an exciting change in itself. To accommodate that, most our IT team is simply relocating to…

Read More Read More

Yesterday was my last day in my private office. I packed up my things and took my painting of Darth Vader off the wall. My floor in the office building is getting remodeled, so I needed to vacate before the demolition crew comes through. I’m moving into a new workspace that does not have offices at all. There’s a lot to be excited for in that new space, but that’s a subject for a future blog article. Today, I look…

Read More Read More

I’ve been working in companies that practice Agile development for about a decade now. I’ve always enjoyed delivering customer value as fast as possible. It fits with my personality. I like structure that helps me go fast, and abhor bureaucracy that slows me down. Even though I’ve worked in an Agile environment and attended numerous workshops on the subject, I never took the time to get myself formally trained and certified in Scrum, until this week. For some of you,…

Read More Read More