Zach on Leadership

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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I had a great opportunity to be a guest on the 12MinuteConvos Podcast with Engel Jones.  We talked about my passion around leadership development. We discussed how I benefited early in my career from some great leaders, and how I am driven to pay it forward and pass it on. We also discussed the habits of a good leader including consistent reading and continuous learning. Listen to this episode here: https://twelveminuteconvos.com/zach-hughes/

There are two kinds of IT departments. The first kind is the cost center. IT is an expense to be managed, like the utility bill. IT focuses on unit cost reduction and efficiency. IT is a means to an end, and a necessary evil to participate in the modern economy. The business needs IT, but doesn’t love it. This is a race to the bottom. The goal is to make the IT widgets that the business needs as cheap as…

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Geeks love to cover their laptops with stickers. It’s a form a self-expression. It tells those around us about what kind of technology we are into and what brands represent us best. You’re a tech, and you are going places. You are working on your leadership skills to influence those around you. You are an avid reader of this super-cool blog that speaks to the challenges you face. Now, you want to show it. That’s why I made the Zach…

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Early in my career, I was a desktop support tech. I wore a pager, took dispatches from the help desk, and wandered around corporate cube farms solving computer issues. I had a tech lead over me. He was responsible for handling the escalations from the techs for anything they couldn’t solve. There was some significant variation on when team members would escalate. Some techs, like me, would work problems hard and thoroughly before escalating. Others really didn’t seem to have…

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I’ve observed over the years that we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to our own career growth. We initially succeed through mastery, but it is mastery that holds us back from moving forward. Being the best in the company on a particular subject matter is great. It makes you the go-to person, gives you purpose, and earns you respect. This is a really strong motivator. It is so strong, that we hold fast to it, even…

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Technologists have a keen ability to push the limits of technology to maximize the difference it can make. We aren’t born this way. However, we all develop the curiosity to tinker with technology long before we make a career out of it. This journey started for many when they got their first computer. My brother was this way. He learned to program our Atari ST computer and push it to the limits. Surprisingly, this was not my start. I saw…

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So, I’m a bit odd, I know. For many years, I’ve conspicuously come to work on Halloween dressed as a science fiction character. In the last couple of years, I’ve taken it even further by assembling my entire team for a meeting, giving it a theme, and conducting it in character. Why on Earth would I do that? On the surface, it appears that I like to have fun, and that’s true. It also appears that I have a general…

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I recently read Satya Nadella’s new book Hit Refresh, and I also heard him speak at Microsoft Ignite and Envision last month. As a technology leader, and as a Microsoft fan, there’s a lot to like about Satya’s approach to leadership, so I thought I’d write a blog article summarizing my learnings. I am biased I’ve been a long-time fan of Microsoft. Frankly, I owe my career to the company. Starting nearly 20 years ago, I built my skills on…

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I love the cloud. I’ve had the opportunity to run mission critical cloud services and applications at several large enterprises. I migrate workloads to the cloud. Sometimes, I migrate workloads out of the public cloud into a private one. In enterprise technology, we have an odd relationship with the cloud. We often get it right, but sometimes, we get it wrong. I’m writing this blog to level-set the discussion. The cloud isn’t a Visio shape Once upon a time the…

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