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 U.S. Product Supply and Distribution for Phillips 66. A mouthful, Jane welcome to Women Mean Business.
Jane: Hi Leisa, thanks for having me; excited to be here with you today.
Leisa: Tell us about what you do, what your division does and your role in it in the company.
Jane: I work for the commercial division in Phillips 66. We are a downstream and midstream energy company. In the commercial division we move commodities and in my role I’m responsible for the products that come off of our U.S. refineries and how those products move, how they get sold into either a trading arm or a fuels marketing arm and then how we store them and schedule them.
Leisa: Whoa, that’s really a lot. I mean did you think you were – I mean I’m going to just flat out ask, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
Jane: You know, I’m not sure I could answer that question that I had any type of specific dream that I wanted to be when I grew up. I would say that I’m probably a planner so I do a lot of logistics work and in a large organization you do a lot of orchestration of a lot of moving parts so those things tend to fall into my skillset and in my roll that’s very complimentary to what I do. S I would say that that’s part and parcel of kind of my background.
Leisa: And what’s been your biggest challenge in this role?
Jane: As I said, there’s always a lot of moving parts and there’s always a plant or a pipeline or a storage facility that’s having some type of operational issue and it’s trying to balance the urgent and the important, keeping our customers in supply, finding opportunities, other resources to get product. So and some of it is keeping people motivated when they’re working through supply disruptions, so lots of challenges in that arena.
Leisa: Great answer, thank you for being with us.
Jane: Sure.
Leisa: There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things. I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson, President and Chief Marketing Officer 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.
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