Mauricio Gaston (“Mo”) Zamora’s (see post) memorial service and celebration of life was held Thursday at the United Methodist Church in Davidson, North Carolina. Mauricio died November 24 (Thanksgiving) while out running with his son Trey, age nine. He was 42.
Mauricio and Pam Zamora were very active in the local community and there were many hundreds of friends, family, church members, and soccer moms-dads-kids in attendance. Pam opened her house to guests thereafter and what a crush that was! (It looked like an entire soccer team was there, in uniform!)
Even though I knew Mo pretty well, I was indeed amazed to find out what an incredible Renaissance person Mo was. He was an accomplished guitarist (classical and electric), woodworker (built guitars and furniture), vinophile (has an amazing wine cellar and his own small vineyard on the property; was the resident wine expert in our partnership – at the reception, we drank only wine that he had made), photographer, soccer player (was invited to practice with a semipro team), soccer coach (see soccer scholarship program below), outdoorsman, scuba diver (his personal dream was to dive the great white sharks-I’m sure he was saving for that upcoming adventure), not to mention husband, father, brother, son, and entrepreneur, agilist and software industry executive.
Mo will be missed in so many ways and he leaves a void that will never be filled. With respect to this blog, and this industry, he was my good friend and partner, an accomplished enterprise agilist who was currently engaged in rolling out lean|agile transformation programs to a number of enterprises. Mauricio was passionate about the business results, the empowerment of self-organizing teams, and the intrinsic motivational and simple humanity benefits that agile can deliver. This was to be his next, full time, career. He’ll leave a void here, too, as now many hundreds of teams, programs, and ultimately, entire enterprises will now never be able to leverage his unique skills.
If we are going to any way make up for this loss to our industry, then we are all going to have to just pick it up a little bit, aren’t we?
For those who knew Mo or are otherwise interested, memorials may be made to:
North Meck Soccer Club, 11138 Treynorth Drive, Suite B, Cornelius, NC 28031 or Davidson United Methodist Church MC, PO Box 718, Davidson, NC 28036. I talked to one of the Meck club coaches and he said that any funds received will be used for a “Mauricio Zamora Scholarship” which will be used to help aspiring youth-athletes participate in a program that they could otherwise not afford (priced a kids soccer uniform lately?). I can just imagine the mental and physical benefits such a scholarship will bring to some number of lucky kids.
Rest in Peace Mo. You will always be missed.
Scaling Software Agility 