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 2134: Double Power of No

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“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.”

I was advising someone who just landed a huge job as the Digital Leader of a large institution with so many digital content and distribution opportunities that he doesn’t know where to start first.  Everyone in the organization has been waiting for someone just like him and now they all want to bring their projects and ideas to him to implement them all and of course, they want to hear, “Yes, Yes. Yes!” from him.  But I encouraged him that he needed to explain to them why instead they should want to hear more, “Nos”, than “Yeses”, if they really want him to succeed. You see, a “Yes” means that we are going to put time and resources on something and by the theory of displacement, something else doesn’t get done.  So, that “Yes” better be the right thing and a whole bunch of “Yeses” just create a ton of dilution of effort and resources, to the point that nothing is moving forward very fast or deliberately.  But a “No”, well a “No” has double the value of “Yes”.  That “No” stops you from working on something you should have never started and it also alleviates you taking away time and resources to something else that was a “Yes”.  So, we have to get comfortable with the double power of “No” and appreciate that we are doing ourselves, or others, a favor when we say, “No”.

God tells us over and over in His Word that we have to be willing to say “No” and that the narrow path is the way, even though it is hard.  When we evaluate where we are today in our walk with Christ, it might be helpful to go through the list of the “No’s” that we are saying to the things of our world.  If that list is hardly there, or not making a difference in strengthening your walk with Christ, then it’s probably time to convert some of those “Yeses” to “No”.  And let’s not forget that God is giving us His double power of No by keeping Him close and reliant on Him each and ever time we want to turn a “Yes” into a “No”.

Reference:  Matthew 7:13-14 (New Living Translation)