The email said, “What in the world are you doing?”
At that point in May 2018, I had been traveling a lot, somewhere in the ballpark of 4 or 5 trips within the span of a few weeks, which meant I was reading A LOT and had been churning through books and making a lot of updates to Goodreads which triggered almost daily updates to Jane Gasdaska. She had taken one of the status update emails from Goodreads and forwarded it to me asking how in the world I had been reading so much lately.
I first met Jane when she was the keynote speaker at an internal tech conference at Phillips 66 in 2014. At the time Jane was a leader within our commercial organization and was a great fit for what we wanted as a keynote speaker. As a member of the core leadership team, I was given the opportunity to go to dinner with our IT leadership team sponsors including our CIO as well as Jane and her assistant. We had a great dinner out with a lot of great conversation, and Jane revealed her I ♥ IT shirt (pictured above). The tech conference was a hit and Jane did a phenomenal job as our keynote speaker. At some point during the conference, it came up that Jane and I were both avid readers, and a couple of years later we connected on Goodreads.
Fast forward to 2018, I read the email mentioned above as I was waiting for one of my co-workers to check out of the hotel in Vegas where I had been a speaker at the ServiceNow Knowledge18 User Group Conference, a final commitment from my previous role in the Customer Support Technology group at Phillips 66. I shot Jane a quick response apologizing for blowing up her inbox and explained that due to my new role as well as commitments from my previous role I had been traveling quite a bit, and I asked how she had been and how she was liking her new (and current) role in Organizational Change Management. That led to a quick touchpoint phone call and an ongoing mentor/mentee relationship where she and I touch base every couple of months to trade stories on how things are going, anywhere I might be stuck, what we’re reading, the pulse in the organization, and the occasional technical troubleshooting that I provide for her. It has been a great two-way street that I look forward to as I see the appointment coming on my calendar.
As a Phillips 66 employee, I am able to receive her Monday Moment blog posts via internal email, but she also posts them on her blog every week. You should check them out on her blog.
Follow Jane Gasdaska: Twitter | LinkedIn | Goodreads | Blog
Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.