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 3K265: Why Can’t We Fix This?

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“A little farther up the shore Jesus saw Zebedee’s sons, James and John, in a boat repairing their nets.”

How about that school in Massachusetts that can’t turn their lights off?  It’s a school that put in a new software system to run the lighting for the 7000+ fixtures and since August of 2021 they haven’t been able to figure out how to turn them off (word has it that it will be this month of February that they will finally get them fixed).  This is a magnified example of what happens to each of us when Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. upgrade or change their software and something goes awry on our personal systems and we have no way of fixing it until the software developers hear of the bug, make it a priority, and then fix it.  It should be a good reminder to us that when we change things for our customers or clients whether our own software, a process, a procedure, even forms and policies, that someone (or more) will feel like that school in Massachusetts that they have a problem and can’t figure out how to get it fixed!

It’s not something anyone would really notice, but I have.  When Jesus came to call the soon to be Disciples,  James and John to come follow Him, we are told they were repairing their nets. Now, these could have been regular wear and tear repairs, but it’s also possibe that these were nets that they had recently sourced from someone different and new and the nets either didn’t hold up, or the design wasn’t working like other nets, and James and John were having to repair them in frustration and weariness.  In moments when we are repairing something (literally and figuratively) we can get to the point where we just want to give up.  Maybe that is where James and John were in the moment that they first met Jesus.  That is what He does for us; He finds us in those moments when are at the end of our nets or when we’ve tried everything we know to do and we still can’t get the lights to go off.  Today, we might be at one of those times and it will be a good time to stop and listen and hear Him calling to us to just follow His way.

Reference: Mark 1:19 (New Living Testament)