Zach on Leadership

You want to be a good leader. Being good means that you have quality ideas inside your head, but more importantly, it means you can easily assimilate ideas around you to arrive at quality decisions. This takes diversity of thought and an intentional act to surround yourself with people different from you. Leaders sometimes inherit leadership teams. Leaders also assemble leadership teams. I’ve been able to do both. How you go about that is critically important. “When two men in…

Read More Read More

It’s common knowledge that successful leaders protect and manage their time effectively. This isn’t an inspiring topic about how we can change the world. It’s a necessary topic for how we make time to do our world-changing stuff. The struggle to manage time is universal. We often know the work we need to do, but are nevertheless challenged to find the time to get it done. I’ve not perfected this, but I’ve learned some things over the years that have…

Read More Read More

I recently gained some new responsibilities at work. In addition to leading the core infrastructure teams, I now also lead application development. Having Development and Operations under a single leader is trending right now, and I’m very excited for the opportunity to be on-point for our DevOps transformation at CHS. As I’ve discussed previously in this blog, I came up through the technical ranks on the infrastructure side before going into leadership. To date, I’ve spent my entire career indirectly supporting…

Read More Read More

There is something about my upbringing in public education that made me feel like I needed to be well-rounded. Some skills came easy. Others took more concerted effort. Rather than spend time developing my strengths, I often felt like I need to spend all of my spare energy shoring up my weaknesses. A well-leveled report card was always the goal. If something was falling, that’s where my focus went. This, of course, was the explicit intention of public education. The…

Read More Read More

Every leader is at the core an agent of change. If you are just maintaining or running your group, you are a manager. Leadership implies change. Changing people isn’t easy, especially if you want to do it without coercion or authoritative power. How do you go about initiating change? Well, let’s look at how Obi-Wan Kenobi did it in Star Wars, A New Hope. Some background information Luke is a rural farm boy, who is being raised by his Uncle Owen….

Read More Read More

It’s no secret that many in the technology field grew up reading comic books and carried their superhero fascination well into adulthood. What once was exclusively the realm of geeks has slowly made its way into the mainstream in the form of a constant stream of blockbuster movies. I love many of the superhero stories, and their resonance with real life in the trenches of enterprise technology work. In this blog article, I will derive the technology leadership lessons from…

Read More Read More

What were you doing this week back in 2003? I don’t even have to think about it. I’ll never forget that I was doing exactly two things: Executing a major enterprise Data Center migration and fighting off the worst cyber-attack the world had ever seen: SQL Slammer. Why have one crisis, when you can have two simultaneously, right? The Data Center Migration My company needed a new Data Center. After all, I single-handedly blew up the old one eight months prior….

Read More Read More

Working in the corporate jungle can be a grind. The sea of cubicles, the clueless bosses, the meaningless busywork: it’s the stuff of Office Space, The Office, Dilbert, and countless other workplace satires. They’re funny because they’re true. If you haven’t figured it out by now, the entire purpose of this blog is to create an antidote for that. Today, I’m going to zero-in on the mindset of an entrepreneur. I’ve spent the majority of my career interacting and networking…

Read More Read More

Jimmy is an IT infrastructure engineer. Jimmy gets an odd request from a customer to do something against his better judgement. Jimmy pushes back. The customer pushes harder, and escalates. Jimmy’s manager gets involved. Jimmy gets told to do it this time, and perhaps next time we’ll take a stand. This one is too urgent, too high profile, or too political. It’s not worth the fight. Let it go. Jimmy gets another odd request from a different customer. Jimmy doesn’t…

Read More Read More

“We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors.” – Jerry Maguire. The world of the corporate enterprise can be a cynical place. Week after week, I preach leadership. I do it for all of you, but I also do it for me. By writing, I remind myself of the truth. Why do you and I need these constant reminders? Our world is cynical, and frankly, sometimes so are we. Cynicism…

Read More Read More