The Working Mother Experience

What an amazing, energy filled day! We officially launched the Working Mother Experience book and in our employee cafe and it was a wonderful event. Much like my experience of the book. It was better than I could have imagined. I was honored to kickoff the event. I was able to share the story of how the the book came about to a room of about 150 people enjoying color coordinated cupcakes. The event gave me a brief forum to talk about how important this project was to me and how much I love being a working mom. Most importantly I was able to thank the people ( from the contributors themselves and the extended team who helped us create something really special to the employees in distribution who got 3000 copies shipped out and into the right hands. Yes, I said it all and still managed to keep it under 5 minutes.

My open was followed by Frank Hauck, EVP of Global Marketing and Customer Quality who spoke to the crowd about how he loved reading the book. He spoke to the fact that the stories resonated with the same themes internationally. People want to be good at their jobs, and good members of their families and communities.

ML Krakuer, new executive co-sponsor for EMC’s Women’s Leadership Forum and Sr. VP for Delivery, spoke about how the book touched her and made reinforced her choice to come to work at EMC. She is relatively new to EMC, but says that she has seen we have great people and looks forward to getting to know us better. A working mother herself, she said that the book was very real and relevant to her.

The last, but not least, formal speaker was our EVP of HR, Jack Mollen. Jack had the crowd chuckling about the experiences he has had as a working dad.  He talked about the importance of family as part of the EMC culture worldwide.  The crowd seemed to nod in understanding when he spoke about the caliber of employees we have at EMC and how he is proud of our accomplishments as a company.

It was outstanding to see so many thought leaders at EMC attend the event. Here are some of the names of those who attended that have an external presence so that can get to know them better. (I highly recommend it). Barry Burke, Polly Pearson, Gina Minks, Steve Todd, and David Spencer.

Overall, the event was the perfect culmination of the connections we have built during this book process. Stacey Yeoman, Project Coordinator wrote a whole piece about those connections at the open of the book. It is definitely worth reading (PDF link is in upper right hand corner of this blog).

Thank you to all who participated in the book’s completion. From the reactions today at the book’s unveiling, it is clear we created something very special!

P.S.  Thanks to all who tweeted today #WME!