Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. My guest today is Jane Gasdaska, the General Manager for US Product Supply and Distribution for Phillips 66. Jane, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Jane: Thanks Leisa, thanks for having me.

Leisa: You’ve achieved such extraordinary success, I want you to share with us what influenced you as you were growing up and going along the path to where you are today.

Jane: Lots of different influences for me. One of the places that I always start with is with my family. I grew up in a family of four children. I had a disabled sister, she’s no longer with us, and my parents took care of her and enabled her to have a very happy and as healthy a life as she could have and I learned a lot from them and watching them care for her. I also had two older brothers and my brothers always expected me to keep up with them. It was never even a question whether or not I was going to be doing whatever activity they were doing, whether or not it was sports or academics, there was always a lot of mentoring, teaching, but a very high expectation as well as what my parents had too. And we joke around in my family and say that kind of their overarching principle is anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And so when you grow up in that kind of household achievement is always kind of at the bottom of everything.

So I would say family was definitely a big influencer, front and center. I’ve also had great role models in my life; one of them that I would attribute to was our Girl Scout leader. So I was in Girl Scouts for probably about 8 years as a child and I finished it, you know, finished all the way that I could; I had lots of great experiences there and I would just attribute a lot of kind of the leadership characteristics that I’d always hoped to develop I picked up from my family and scouting.

Leisa: Thank you, thanks so much for being here.

Jane: Absolutely.

Leisa: There you have it, extraordinary experience from an extraordinary woman. I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson, President and Co-founder of ContentActive, Houston’s leading web and mobile technology company. You can find me at ContentActive.com or follow me on Twitter @LHNelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.