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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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If you’ve been following Zach on Leadership for any amount of time, you know that I’m all about servant leadership. It’s a regular theme on this blog. If you’d like an overview of my views on servant leadership, check out this article. I’m in favor of it because it yields such good outcomes for everyone involved. The employees win, the customers win, and the leaders win. There aren’t any downsides. Yet, some still resist this leadership philosophy. Some argue that...

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Don’t you love it when you find a small tweak that makes a big difference? That always feels like a win because so much of what we do requires tremendous effort and the benefits are not always realized. We experienced one of these low-effort, high-reward changes this past year, and I thought I’d share our insights. Problem #1: Like many organizations, we rely on the timely cascade of relevant, contextualized information. Discussions at the executive level get shared with the...

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I just got back from a two-week vacation. A common reaction I get is, “Wow. How did you pull that off?” I didn’t always do this. I started taking 2-3 week vacations annually about 9 years ago. The thing that triggered it was the purchase of an RV for our family of six. Sure, you can take your RV out for a weekend, and we do, but if you really want to use it for what it’s capable of, you...

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This past weekend, the world got one of the best-ever looks at the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. Personally, I was in northern Minnesota at the time. I forgot my DSLR camera at home but managed to snap some decent shots with my iPhone. I took in the beautiful sights with several friends, who were also feverishly taking photos of the sky with their phones. This is what I experienced last weekend. Many of you probably experienced something similar:...

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Note to my non-techie audience: This article is a bit more technical than usual, but as always, there’s a leadership lesson. This week, I’m reflecting on my time as an engineer and am considering what that means for my leadership practice. There are things that I did back then, that I now oversee. The technologies and times have changed, but a lot of the principles have not. 20 years ago, I worked as a senior systems engineer for a financial...

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Is leadership a general skill, or is it context-specific? In other words, does it help to have domain knowledge in the area you are leading, or can a skilled leader lead anything effectively? I’ve spent 100% of my professional career leading in the technology domain. I’ve never led a business unit, sales team, marketing function, or anything else. I generally consider my technical knowledge a huge asset when leading technology teams. It gives me credibility and empathy with my team...

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