As a leader looking to advance, you have to manage effectively in a number of directions. You need to lead your function well (managing down). You need to have a good comradery and collaboration with your peers (managing sideways). You also need to be a courageous follower of your leader (managing up). This, however, is not enough. At one point in my career at a previous company, I thought I was doing really well. I was leading a high performing…
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….
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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,…
Enterprise IT teams have a lot of responsibilities. We need to run 24/7/365 operations, give great customer service, develop new business capabilities, keep the hackers out, refresh the technology on lifecycle, orchestrate M&A activities, implement business projects, and somewhere down the list is innovation. Yes, the business expects us to innovate. It’s part of the job. The term, innovation, has some connotation for us. In my role, I buy technology and services from tech companies. Those tech companies have R&D…
I love the Back to the Future trilogy. It’s hard to admit this, but growing up, this trilogy was probably even more influential than Star Wars. Marty McFly was the guy that everyone wanted to be. He skateboarded, played in a rock band that I’m afraid was just too darn loud, and had time travel at his disposal. He basically had it all. Marty McFly was late for everything. As you think back through the series, just about every scene…
Boba Fett is one of the coolest characters in Star Wars. He’s mysterious. He’s independent. He has his own unique style. Best of all, he’s a bounty hunter. That profession may give you the impression that Boba Fett is a not very nice, but to the contrary, he is actually a very caring individual. Case-in-point, Darth Vader wanted to test his carbonite freezer to make sure it was safe for people before using it on Luke. When Vader volunteered Han…
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