What is the president up to, anyway?
Greg Croce | TLT President's Report March 2019
From New Orleans to Germany to Hamilton, a view from 35,000 feet.
Your board spends most of its time developing, growing and supporting member products and services.
An STLE past president I spoke with before my term began told me the toughest part of the job wasn’t representing STLE at various events, leading the board, etc., it was coming up with ideas to write up for the monthly magazine article. Well, I am at that point. So I decided this month to just tell you what I am doing as your president for the 2018-2019 STLE year.
To start, I am writing this article 35,000 feet above the Earth, returning home after some time in Europe. One of the events I was invited to attend on this trip was the OilDoc Conference, put on by OELCHECK in Germany. We attend this event each time it is produced (every two years) as OELCHECK is one of our key affiliates in Europe. They manage a portfolio of very well-known education programs in Europe, including a few tied to supporting STLE certification. The event pulls both tribologists and lubrication engineers together and has grown from the first years, with just over 100 people attending, to close to 500 people this year. It was very well run and educational. Just
beware of the Octoberfest in January portion of the program!
This has been a rather long trip, as it began just after STLE’s winter board meeting. As you may know, our board of 24 people meets quarterly. The first board meeting is the Thursday of the annual meeting, followed by another the weekend of the Tribology Frontiers Conference, then the winter meeting in January, with the final one the weekend preceding the annual meeting. As you can see from the timing, all meeting locations are known except the winter meeting, which happens to be the choice of the current president. I knew long in advance my winter board meeting would be in my favorite U.S. city (not counting home) of New Orleans.
In addition to the board meetings, the president leads regular Executive Committee team meetings at STLE’s Chicago headquarters,
and the Executive Committee meets by phone each and every Friday morning! You might ask, why all the meetings? What can you possibly talk about? To answer that question, you only have to read my previous articles. We are a big society with lots of income and expenses, not to mention a strategy to grow and support our members with continued improvements in our offering of member products and services.
So that has pretty much been the work in 2019. The rest of this year, leading up to the May Annual Meeting in Nashville, I plan to visit several local sections to update members on what STLE is doing, give a technical presentation about stuff I personally work on at Chevron and generally spend some time with and thank our local section leadership and members for their contributions to our society. Plans are set for visits to Hamilton (done!, thanks Lynn), Philadelphia, Upper Ohio Valley, Chicago, Houston, Canton/Cleveland, NorCal (my section!), Seattle, Portland and, I hope, a few more.
I also wanted to provide you with an overview of what I did for you in 2018, but seems I will have to let that wait until next month.
Until then, Connect, Learn and Achieve.
Greg Croce is Delo Brand technical manager for Chevron Products Co. in Richmond, Calif. You can reach him at gcroce@chevron.com.