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 2243: Pick Me!

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“I was chosen to explain to everyone this mysterious plan that God, the Creator of all things, had kept secret from the beginning.”

“Pick me!  Pick Me!, goes the recognizable voice of Eddie Murphy as Donkey in Shreck.  The desire to want to be selected is a powerful motivator.  It’s what drives us to market and sell.  It is also what drives many of our career moves.  We want to be picked for what we want to do, but just as much we want to be picked for what we don’t yet know what we want to do. Recruiting someone, if done well, will make the prospective employee feel as though they have been hand-picked from a select and elite group of potentials and that for whatever reason, this one person feels very, very specially selected.  This is how it should always feel.

When we stop and think hard about all the God has given us and read His promises to us, how can we feel anything but hand-picked, personally loved, and selected to reside eternally with the creator of all that we know?  But somehow we always get it wrong and instead of feeling so cared for, we turn our back on that which He gives us.  All day long in work and life we jump up and down like Donkey wanting to be picked.  Paul was so confident in His faith and how God had changed him that he told others that he had been “chosen”.  In God’s Word, that’s a big term and not lightly used.  But, there is no reason that within our own faith when we recognize all that He has done for us personally and in the lives of others, that we can try a little less of acting like we still want to be picked and a lot more of accepting that we’ve already been chosen. Now we just need to accept our selector.

Reference: Ephesians 3:9 (New Living Translation)