Gunnar Mitchell

Background

About Gunnar Mitchell

I started at Apple Retail as a Sales Specialist in 2014 with two things in mind. One was a steady paycheck and two was learning how one of the most impactful companies in the world runs their customer service and technical support. After years of learning everything I could from everyone around me (peers, bosses and customers alike) I now Lead the Genius Bar team and have a lot of the same questions. I lead through example under the principle of 'I would not ask a member of my team to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself.' I believe that people who have leaders they trust and who value them for the work they do, not just for doing their work, will support each other and their customers to the best of their ability. In order to grow a business of any kind, the ability to measure your impact is paramount. That said, I am a firm believer using numbers only to find your blind spots. Data sheets give you the tools you need to see at a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. However, the people change the numbers not the other way around. I am gifted with the ability to intuitively find the cause of issues within my team by recognizing patterns in the metrics, informing me how to support but only connecting on a person level makes that support valuable. Thanks to the work/life balance that hourly pay provides I spend my free time surrounding myself with unfinished projects that I have little more to learn from. Most involve taking something apart to learn how it works which is a habit I've had since before I could form proper sentences. I mainly focus around automating things that get in the way of what matters. The ongoing themes have been DIY Home Automation, Network and Database management, virtual computing, passive energy solutions and generally getting technology to do things that the designers definitely did not have in mind. I am proficient in MacOS, Linux (proficient in this case meaning decent CLI skills and also know how to Google error messages, I use Rasbian and MQTT for most of my IoT projects and have troubleshooted enough issues running old pc games to know the ins and outs of Windows. I have made an ongoing 5 year independent study of complex systems. My favorite authors on the subject being M. Mitchell Waldrop and David Weinberger. I also recommend the writings of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.'The Undoing Project' by Micheal Lewis is a great introduction to their work. I enjoy making things better. I enjoy taking a broken system and taking it apart to put it back together in a better way.