Zach on Leadership

I recently read the biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance. For those of you that don’t recognize his name, Elon is best known as a founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. He has successfully disrupted the banking, aerospace, energy, and automobile industries, and he’s only 45 years old. He is a fascinating individual and an icon of entrepreneurship and innovation. He’s also the real-life inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark/Iron Man, my favorite super hero. One…

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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 was too young. It terrified me. I think I had nightmares for a week straight. I didn’t see it again until I was an adult, at which point it became one…

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Congratulations. You are the new person on the team. We’ve all been that person from time to time. You get to hold that title until someone newer comes along. Presumably, you got onto this new team because you have lots of talent and plenty of great ideas. Perhaps it’s a new company, or just a new position within your company. When you look at your team, you see rich opportunity to implement all of your new ideas. This blog article…

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Today marks the one year anniversary of Zach on Leadership. I’d like to thank all of my readers for engaging with me, encouraging me, and spreading the word. This started off as a wild experiment, and has now become an important part of how I communicate my ideas and influence the greater IT community. I’d like to briefly revisit the mission for this blog. My tag line in my logo says it all: “Better Leaders in Enterprise Technology.” Enterprise Technology…

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This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership at the University of Missouri. CHS was among 22 agricultural cooperatives at the institute. Working for CHS, the largest agricultural cooperative, has taught me many things over the past two years. Due to my back-office role in enterprise technology, I only had basic knowledge of the history, purpose, and challenge of the cooperative business model. Spending a week with colleagues from cooperatives around the world, academic…

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The Setup Most technologists start their careers as generalists. This is often how educational programs are built. They are designed to expose learners to a variety of relevant technologies to make students relatively versatile to the needs of the marketplace. Even if your educational background is specialized, often entry level positions in enterprise technology are general in nature. Help Desk professionals solve a variety of end-user problems. Operations professionals handle the entire gamut of IT systems support. Junior Developers often…

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I was recently looking over my LinkedIn profile, and I noticed that my most-endorsed skill is “Disaster Recovery.” It’s interesting because I’ve made no attempt in my career to make myself known as the Disaster Recovery guru go-to-guy, but alas, it looks like that’s exactly what I am most well-known for. After thinking about it a little more, I realized that Disaster Recovery really has been a big part of my career, and I’ve hardly written anything about it. Thus,…

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The Matrix is one of my all-time favorite movies. The post-apocalyptic cyberpunk style mixed with the philosophical depth and ground-breaking effects all add up to a monumental achievement. Its influence on pop culture remains ever-present today, which is shocking considering it was released many years ago. Come to think of it, 1999 was a darn good year for movies. Fight Club and Office Space also came out that year. be sure to check out my articles on those too. So…

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I’ve written often about how to build and maintain a healthy team culture. The context for all of that is the team you have. Sometimes you need to recruit and hire a team. The reasons for that are various. Perhaps your organization is going through a growth spurt. Perhaps your organization is going in a new direction and you need a new mix of skills. Besides the routine one-at-a-time hiring that we all do as a normal course of business,…

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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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