Zach on Leadership

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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In the world of enterprise technology there is a pecking order. It all comes down to who has domain admin rights, and who does not. I started my career working on a help desk and then eventually into desktop support. Early on, I wasn’t trusted with such rights, and I didn’t need them to do my job. Even though that made good sense for me to not have any more permissions than I needed, I still longed for that power….

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I recently finished reading every book Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. I started with The Tipping Point, then read Blink. Next I covered Outliers,  David and Goliath, and finally, What the Dog Saw. None of these books are explicitly about leadership or technology, but there was something about Gladwell’s writing that compelled me to consume more of it. About the time that I was finishing up What the Dog Saw, it dawned on me: Gladwell has a stark and unique ability…

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I am a blogger. 10 months ago, I wasn’t. This experience doesn’t make me an expert on the subject of blogging by any means, but more often than I would have expected, I’ve been asked for blogging advice. I thought I’d write this article to answer some of the common questions I get, and provide a few pointers and words of encouragement to those that are considering taking up blogging. Start with Why Blogging is a lot of work. You…

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In today’s world, it’s fashionable to model leadership success after companies like Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, and Netflix. In this blog article, I’m going to reach back and draw upon the leadership lessons from companies like Philip Morris, Circuit City, and Walgreens. Why on earth would I do that? About 15 years ago, I read the quintessential leadership book of its time: Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Since then, and the hundreds…

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