Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 2311: Cycle Leadership: Promising

purposed worKING No Comments

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”

Yesterday, we explored the business leadership phase that might be the hardest; feeling “stuck”.  Before that, we checked into the “weakening” stage.  Today, we turn the corner to “promising.” We know this feeling as the business starts to pick up, the product improvements start to work, our services get recognized and word starts to spread.  We know we aren’t there yet, but the signs look right.  This is usually the stage when we start to feel confident to talk about ourselves, raise some money, hire, or even spend more on marketing to scale the business.  It’s a great feeling that doesn’t come around often.  Start-ups hope to reach their promising point so that they can reach the dreams they have worked so hard to achieve.  But, like fame, promising can be fleeting.  So, let’s be sure that we are evaluating where we are correctly so that our next step of growth will be built upon what is sustainable.

It is when life and things start to look promising that we can begin to look away from God. It’s counter-intuitive as we might have just spent an inordinate amount of time on our knees trying to figure out how we are going to get unstuck, but now that things are looking up, we lessen our dependence and start to rely upon ourselves.  And, let’s be honest with ourselves, when we start to go this way, we know that we are on our way to trouble.  But, we still we do it.  If today is a day where everything is going your way, and I hope that it is, be sure and take a humility check so that what is promising doesn’t become a new stumbling block. Instead, let’s move our dependence back to where it belongs!

Tomorrow, we will be thankful for what “growth” looks like!

Reference:  Proverbs 3: 5-6 (New Living Translation)