Zach on Leadership

The best part about technology leadership is that almost every technologist can do it, though few are up for the adventure. To do so requires a willingness to depart from the world of ones and zeros and enter a different world governed by actual human beings. While human beings are in fact, mostly harmless, this other world is a bit unnerving for the average technology geek. Therefore, I’ve assembled this hitchhiker’s guide to help you find your way. Don’t panic…

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Henry Ford is famously credited as saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The attribution may not be accurate, but it’s still stirring. Apple made the iPhone because everyone at Apple universally thought all cell phones stunk. So, they made one that they liked. I gave conference presentations in 2013 and 2015 postulating that when users ask for an iPad for work, they would be better served by a Windows tablet instead….

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In A.D. 2101 war was beginning. Sure, but about one hundred years prior to that, there was an internet meme that went viral at a time where we didn’t know what the term “internet meme” even meant. This was before YouTube and Facebook. Videos were made from Flash or GIFs, and shared via email. All Your Base Are Belong to Us was the preeminent internet meme of the early 2000’s. Why was it huge? Geek kitsch and nostalgia. About 15…

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In many ways I’ve thrived in my career through meritocracy. Competition is one of my top five StrengthsFinder themes. I compete for promotions and new job opportunities. I compete with other companies to get top talent onto my team. I’m intrinsically motivated to be the best performer among my peer group. Sometimes I achieve that and sometimes I don’t, but no one needs to tell me to do it. I naturally pursue high-performance. There are many companies that confidently call…

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I built my career on IT infrastructure. About a year ago, I was given the opportunity to lead software development too. I love infrastructure. I love code. I really love Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC is this end-state nirvana where all of your infrastructure can be provisioned, configured, and maintained programmatically, rather than manually through interactive consoles. It’s only been a recent phenomenon that this is even possible. Infrastructure administrators and engineers all learned how to do their jobs via management consoles,…

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Coaching means a lot of things to a lot of people. Of course, there are sports coaches. In my personal life, I’m a Lego robotics coach. There are also business coaches and life coaches. I’m not a professional coach, at least not as my primary job function. I’m a technology leader. However, to do that effectively, I often need to play the role of a coach. I’ll get into what that looks like shortly, but first, I’d like to take…

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I recently read the latest autobiography of Richard Branson, Finding My Virginity. For those of you that don’t recognize his name, Richard is best known as the founder of the Virgin Group, a conglomerate of Virgin brands such as Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, and 400 other companies. Sir Richard Branson is also a knight of the United Kingdom. In addition to being a billionaire entrepreneur, he’s an adventurer, philanthropist, and all-around troublemaker. I’m not as capable…

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Enterprise technology groups have a lot of responsibilities, but their primary mission is incident resolution. Incident resolution typically happens through the forward escalation process, but sometimes it is invoked in the reverse order. In this article, I will explore the pitfalls of this predicament, and offer some solutions. Forward Escalation This is the normal mode of incident resolution. The best-case scenario is a user who can achieve incident resolution via a self-service portal or a good knowledge base. If not,…

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I’m a numbers guy. I like measuring my performance, tracking progress, and holding myself and my team accountable to metric-driven goals… until I don’t. I’m also a people-person. I don’t want my contribution to be defined by a figure. I hate it when metrics drive bad behavior. I care about culture and the health of my team a lot more than next quarter’s target. In one breath, I champion the need for data-driven decision-making, and in the next, I criticize…

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This fall, I had the opportunity to coach a Lego robotics team in the FIRST Lego League. There are over 32,000 teams in the First Lego League in 88 countries, and over 600 teams in Minnesota alone. Each season, every team in the league receives the same tournament board. Teams design, build, and program their robots to score points on the tournament board. The robots must be designed to operate autonomously. You can read more about it here. Our team…

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