It had been 5 years since I last coached a competitive Lego robotics team. 5 long years. What could possibly have changed? From 2017-2020. I coached a Lego robotics team through three seasons, two of which climaxed with appearances at the state championships. Those were some great years, and they inspired many blog articles. If you’d like to check them out, click here, here, and here. But then covid hit, and that changed everything. Also, shortly after that, all of...

Read More Read More

The post For the Love of Robots appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

I love to teach leadership lessons inspired by pop culture references. Last week I drew leadership lessons from Napoleon Dynamite. That lesson was targeted at people my age and younger. Some of my older readers may not have gotten much out of it. I’d like to balance that out with an article that will likely resonate with people my age and older. In 1976, Boston released their debut self-titled album, with the hit, “Peace of Mind.” Fast forward 20 years,...

Read More Read More

The post Leadership Lessons from Boston’s ‘Peace of Mind’ appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

Napoleon Dynamite was released 20 years ago and was wildly successful, especially considering its tiny budget. The first time I saw it, I thought it was pretty dumb. But I must admit, it’s grown on me over the years. I recently watched it with my family and thought it was hilarious. I declared right in the moment, that I would be Napoleon Dynamite for Halloween. And, of course, you all know I like to draw leadership lessons from pop culture, and I...

Read More Read More

The post Leadership Lessons from Napoleon Dynamite appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

Roughly 12-14 years ago, a war raged in every corporate IT department. The people wanted iPhones at work. Corporate IT clung to their BlackBerry’s. This is most certainly old news. Why bring it up now? I think time gives us perspective. There are lessons to be gleaned now that were hard to see then. We love to talk about the hot new tech trends. Do we ever look back and evaluate our previous positions? What did we get right? What...

Read More Read More

The post Leadership Lessons from Losing the BlackBerry appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

There’s a meme circulating on the internet called the bell curve meme, or the midwit meme. It points out funny things that newbies do, compared to the prevailing wisdom of the masses, compared to the insight of the experts. The joke is that the experts often mirror the newbies. I haven’t seen the meme applied to technology leadership, but I thought I’d give it a try. “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions,” says the leader, feeling smart, strong, and...

Read More Read More

The post Bring me Problems, not Solutions appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

Eight years ago when I started Zach on Leadership, some of my first blog articles were about helping people advance in their careers. I love techies. I’m one of them. I spent years of my career as a technician and engineer. Then I advanced and started climbing the corporate ladder. I truly believe that techies make the best technology leaders, but few of them are equipped to succeed in leadership. That’s where I come in. I detailed the pathway that...

Read More Read More

The post What’s the Difference Between a Director and a Vice President? appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

One of the most fundamental questions a tech executive must answer is, should we buy or build our software solutions? On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward question, but it can get complicated in a hurry. The basic line of reasoning works like this: Is there a commercial solution that meets my needs? If so, I should probably buy it, because why would I reinvent the wheel? That would be dumb. On the other hand, if I have...

Read More Read More

The post Reimagining the Buy vs. Build Process appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook with the motto, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Eventually, they abandoned that motto after they broke a few too many things. I relate to this struggle more than most. Some lean more toward operational stability. Some lean more toward disruptive innovation. I’m squarely in the uncomfortable middle. Operations I’ve been accountable for operations my whole career. Twice now, I’ve been explicitly hired into a company because they really needed some operational rigor. Things were breaking...

Read More Read More

The post The Balancing Act of Innovation and Operations appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

Last week, I shared some leadership lessons from our company’s response to the global outage caused by a CrowdStrike update. Upon further reflection, there is an additional lesson to be shared. If you missed last week’s article go back and read it, then continue on here. After the initial recovery of our critical workloads, we took stock of the enormous job ahead of us to recover a large number of individual end-user computers spread across the globe. By then, we...

Read More Read More

The post Leadership Lessons from Volunteering for Extra Work appeared first on Zach on Leadership.

I awoke on Friday, July 19th to a phone full of missed calls and texts. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I went to my work computer, and jiggled my mouse to wake it up, only to see the blue screen of death. I returned the calls and quickly got up to speed on the technical carnage impacting the planet. Some of you never heard of CrowdStrike before last Friday, but most of us in enterprise technology know it well....

Read More Read More

The post The Day 8.5 Million Computers Died appeared first on Zach on Leadership.