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The Knowns, The Unknowns, and The Herd As a Business and Technology leader, my entire career has been built on anticipating risk and engineering predictability. When you manage enterprise systems, you build redundancy and failover protocols. You spend your days mapping out every conceivable threat. In the world of corporate risk management, we operate by a philosophy famously articulated by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. During a 2002 Pentagon news briefing rega

There is nothing quite like a recipe passed down through generations, and my mom, Janet Rose McDermott Harms, was the absolute queen of creating unforgettable meals. Jan was a force of nature—she was a stunningly beautiful woman, an exceptionally talented cook, the drum major of her high school marching band, and possessed a brilliant, Mensa-level intelligence. She brought that signature precision, passion, and creativity into everything she did, especially her cooking. In fa

The High Cost of Transactional People If you spend your career building—whether that’s technology systems at a Fortune 50 company or the operational framework of a growing MSP—you learn a fundamental rule of construction: Not all materials are meant to bear weight. If you try to build a skyscraper on a foundation of drywall, it will collapse. You have to know the difference between the materials that look good on the surface and the materials that can actually hold the buildi

Why You Need a Leader, a Mentor, and a Sponsor. In corporate life, one of the most common reasons careers stall is the mistaken belief that one person—usually a direct manager—is supposed to play every supporting role in our professional lives. To use a systems metaphor: we expect our daily operating system to also act as our long-term backup and our external network. It just doesn't scale. I recently had a conversation with a friend who was feeling incredibly frustrated. The

Winning the War in Your Mind: A Journey of Self-Discovery There is a song that has been the soundtrack to much of my life. It’s by the legend, Michael Jackson: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make that change." In leadership, we spend 90% of our time looking out the window—at our teams, our KPIs, or difficult colleagues. We obsess over fixing their behavior. But we rarely look in the mirror. And when we do, we often don't unde

The Danger of the "Pass-Through" Leader In every data center, there is usually one rack in the corner that everyone ignores. It’s an old server. The lights are blinking, the fans are whirring, and it’s consuming electricity. But if you look at the logs, you realize something terrifying: It isn't actually processing any data. It’s just taking up space. In my career, I encountered a leader who was the human equivalent of that legacy server. His name was Adam. Coming off my own

The "Dark Side" of management that few publications talk about: The Weaponization of HR and Victimhood - where an individual, realizing they cannot function within the system, decides to crash the system to save themselves. When Incompetence Masks Itself as Victimhood In software development, we have a concept called "exception handling." When a program encounters an error, it’s supposed to catch it, log it, and recover. But sometimes, you encounter a "Fatal Error." This is w

When Public and Private Interfaces Don’t Match: A Candid Reflection by Jen McCoy In the world of technology, an "interface" is a shared boundary where two separate components exchange information. For a system to work, that interface must be stable. If you send a command, you expect a consistent result. Leadership operates the same way. Your team needs to know that the "you" they speak to in private is the same "you" that shows up in public. When those two versions of a leade