I drive manual transmission cars. I always have. Everyone one of us inherits certain traits and ideas from our family of origin. We all learned about politics and faith from our parents. I also learned that drivers in the Hughes family prefer manual to automatic transmissions. My first car was manual. It made learning to drive harder, but I accepted the challenge. Nearly everyone else I knew started with an automatic. It didn’t matter that it only had a mere…

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Every leader, by definition, is 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? In this article we will learn about change leadership from Obi-Wan Kenobi and see observe how he influenced Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, A New Hope. Please take a few minutes and…

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I had a fantastic opportunity this week to participate in the Lean Executive Leadership Institute through the University of Kentucky College of Engineering. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lean is an organizational philosophy born out of the Toyota Production System, which was first developed by Taiichi Ohno in the 1950’s. Toyota has earned a reputation for operational excellence and has been transparent about their secret to success for generations. Why Kentucky? Firstly, it’s a whole lot closer than…

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I love new technology. That’s one of the reasons my job is so fun. I get to see the latest and greatest technologies and put them to work to help our company achieve our purpose. There are two side-effects of this activity that are not as much fun: DevOps and Scrum frameworks have a useful term, called the Definition of Done. You can read about the concept here. I’ve never seen it applied to the technology lifecycle, but I’m going…

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I love the future, but sometimes, it is important to recognize the past. More than most, I pay attention to company history. I love our origin story and the twists and turns along the way. Understanding our past can help us make sense of our present and realize our future. CHS is a 90-year-old company. That history is filled with a lot of mergers. The most significant merger happened in 1998 when Cenex and Harvest States joined to form CHS….

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I’ve been leading infrastructure teams at CHS for nearly four years now. A little over two years ago I got the opportunity to lead our development teams too. Since then, we’ve been our on DevOps journey to align teams and invest in technologies that help us operate more effectively. We’ve made a number of slight adjustments along the way and have piloted a few different ways of working so we can learn what works best. You can read about some…

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About a month ago, CHS opened a new office in Lowertown, St. Paul. It was a new kind of office for us. We did it for a variety of reasons. One of the more interesting drivers was our desire to experiment. You can read all about the overall vision in my previous article on the subject. If you missed it, give it a quick read first, then continue on here. I’d like to use this article to dive into an…

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I’ve been working in companies that practice Agile development for about a decade now. I’ve always enjoyed delivering customer value as fast as possible. It fits with my personality. I like structure that helps me go fast, and abhor bureaucracy that slows me down. Even though I’ve worked in an Agile environment and attended numerous workshops on the subject, I never took the time to get myself formally trained and certified in Scrum, until this week. For some of you,…

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In the late 90’s and early 2000’s I worked as a desktop support technician. I’d take dispatches from the help desk on my pager and fix computer issues. Ghost was a ubiquitous tool in those days for re-imaging a computer back to the standard gold image. Ghost wasn’t just a product. It became a verb. I distinctly recall that there were two types of desktop support technicians: The Troublehooter: This person would work extensively to figure out the root cause…

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When I was growing up, General Mills marketed Kix cereal as “Kid-Tested. Mother-Approved.” This catchy product marketing approach took into consideration the needs of two different but equally important stakeholders for their product. If it’s been a while, you can watch the commercial here: Kid-Tested Cereal Kids are the end-user of cereal. They want something tasty, with a pleasant texture, in a colorful box. I picture General Mills scientists feeding Kix to kids in a lab and measuring their responses….

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