Zach on Leadership

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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Hackers are bad, scary, criminal, and worst of all, they wear hoodies, right? Hackers don’t belong in enterprise technology teams, right? Wrong! Personally, I’ve been fascinated by hackers my whole life, probably since I first saw WarGames. While I don’t consider myself a hacker, I’ve done some light hacking over the years. Shortly after I went to school and learned Windows networking, I visited a friend’s house and he showed me his new computer. I noticed he had high-speed internet (somewhat…

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Some technology leaders come from the business. Other technology leaders come-up through the ranks of technicians, engineers, and developers. For those of you in the second category, this article is all about how letting your “geek flag fly” can help you be a better leader. You may think that being a geek isn’t an advantage, and you need shed your geeky ways to fit in with the mainstream business leadership crowd. While aspects of that may be true, I’ll argue…

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My all-time favorite leadership film is Jerry Maguire. Many of you may find this a bit surprising and would think I would name Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, or Aliens. All of those are near the top of my list, but there is something about the story of Jerry Maguire that I find so incredibly relatable, especially from a leadership perspective. Jerry Maguire is a sports agent, which he describes as a behind-the-scenes job. “You know those photos where…

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Leaving a good job is hard. It’s been one year since I left RCIS/Wells Fargo to join CHS. It was a very tough decision. It was a leap of faith from the good thing I had going to the potentially great thing I was going to. There were no guarantees, but I took the risk. In this article I will revisit the reasons I left RCIS, reflect on the last year at CHS, and look forward to the years to…

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