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 2154: Character Testing

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“Until the time came to fulfill his dreams, the Lord tested Joseph’s character.”

The word character has come up a number of times in the last week.  A week ago today I was running in Washington, DC and at the President Teddy Roosevelt Memorial, I read on the memorial that he said “In man or nation the one indisputable requisite is character”. The night before at the Kennedy Center Honors, as Al Pacino was being honored in the White House ceremony, he said, “I don’t usually speak if I am not speaking the lines of a character”.  And today I was reading an article about leadership and character was one of the four descriptive words for a strong leader.  so, there is character that represents the values that we hold and how we demonstrate those values and then there is a character that we can play out on stage, or in life.  And when we put on the character of our live, shouldn’t they really be the same?  You see, when our character  is most important to who we are, then we will find that character will be consistent across all of our works and endeavors.

The Old Testament is filled with those whose character was tested by God.  Joseph got as much of this testing as anyone and maybe more than anyone.  But, he stood firm on his character as all he had when other things were taken from him. Today, our character will be tested. It might be something that is a big test, but more than likely it will be something small and seemingly inconsequential…to us…for now.  Let’s remember today that we are to consider each and every character test to be sure we are living out our life as God asks us to do, big or small.

Reference:  Psalm 105:19 (New Living Translation)