Zach on Leadership

Over the years of working in enterprise technology, I’ve learned that I need to wear many hats. One of those key responsibilities is firefighter. It’s a baseline expectation that comes with the territory. Even though high availability and disaster resiliency technologies have evolved our capabilities over the years, we still deal with things that go bump in the night. Over the years, I’ve responded to (and caused) complete Data Center failures and have lost entire environments of data only to…

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It’s been more than a decade since I’ve been an engineer, but I remember being frustrated that I could never get the attention of technology vendors. They always wanted to talk to “the decision maker.” I thought to myself, when I become a leader, it will be great because then I will get their attention. I, of course, had no clue what on earth I was asking for. I’m the decision maker. I’m the person with the budget. I buy…

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In today’s digital economy, if you don’t exist on social media, you don’t exist. Personal brand management is sometimes a tough concept to get your head around. Many of us work for corporations and do not run our own businesses. Personal brand management is a bit like “you, incorporated.” The irony is, most of us hate sales and marketing. That’s why we work in enterprise technology, you know, so we don’t have to do that annoying stuff. But alas, in today’s…

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In Western culture, we are used to a certain kind of leadership persona. We are used to loud, charismatic, bigger-than-life leaders. The idea of a quiet, humble, but strong leader is something we are still learning how to embrace. Something about that doesn’t seem quite like leadership to us, but that is starting to change, and that is good news for us. No longer do you need to be able to wow a crowd or be the life of the…

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I’m a techie. I like talking to computers more than people. I’m also a strong introvert and spent a good portion of my childhood fighting social anxiety. Fortunately, through a lot of focus and practice, I can perform well in social situations, although it still exhausts me. I know I’m not alone. Enterprise technology is filled with people just like me. We are intelligent but have a hard time communicating our ideas with others, and that makes us frustrated. Being…

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Many technology professionals learn their trade from the school of hard knocks. However, formal higher education is an important ingredient in any career growth plan. Education is Rule #4 in my Rules for Advancement blog series. I touched on the subject there, but will expound on it here. There are many approaches. I’m personally fond of the path I took, as it is a bit unique. I’ll share my educational journey in this article with the goal that you can…

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Confession: Sports metaphors for leadership annoy me. Not only are they overused and cliché, they presuppose the virtues of organized team sports. Growing up, I wasn’t very athletic, so I had some pretty lousy experiences with organized team sports. Even though I worked at it and tried my best, I was terrible. My coaches played me for the minimum amount of time allowed by the league, and the star player on one of my teams actually told me that he…

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of taking on the persona of a hacker to break down all aspects of our technology, to ensure it is secure and reliable. This article is about makers, the opposite of hackers. Where hackers break, makers create. Maker culture is a real phenomenon, if you are completely unfamiliar with it, read-up on it here. The gist of it is this: There is a growing movement of people that prefer a do-it-yourself…

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There are few things that make an engineer’s guts churn like corporate politics. Let’s face it, engineers are pretty rational people for the most part. We like decisions that are made by reason and facts, not emotion or politics. But the reality of all enterprise-scale organizations is that politics play a part in the decision-making process at least some of the time. And that of course, irks us. While we understand that we will never find a politics-free workplace, we…

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This article is about networking. Actual in-person, human-to-human communication. You know, in meatspace. For the those of you that don’t know what meatspace is, I’ll define it for you: It’s real life. The term is derived from the Terry Bisson’s famous 1990 science fiction short story, They’re Made Out of Meat. As technology professionals, we live digital lives in cyberspace. Meatspace can be a special challenge. Let’s face it, we went into the technology profession because we like talking to…

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