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 ______: Accounting Audits

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“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

Anyone who has ever been through any type of accounting audit knows just how “not fun” the process can be.  Looking back and having to dig through each and every number and then go through the history, the thinking at the time, etc. can be laborious.  But, if you are a public entity this comes with the cost of doing business.  And if you have ever been part of a restatement then you have experienced the extra pain and anguish that comes with that exercise.  We go through all the stages when a restatement occurs; denial, anger, blame, questioning, embarrassment and finally acceptance.  It’s really unpleasant, especially when it was just an honest mistake that then comes under the scrutiny of integrity.  It’s more than worth triple-checking every number and having a robust checks and balance process in place before any number is ever published.

Last week I received a call from a former colleague, friend and faithful reader of purposed worKING.  Tom left me a voicemail message that he had something to share with me and asked that I give him a call back.  At our age, a call like that usually means that there is bad news to be shared that doesn’t want to be left on a voicemail.  Tom’s son had been sick earlier in the year and Patti and I had been praying for him, but last we had heard he was doing well, but I was for sure that I was going to receive bad news on his recovery.  Or, as my mind considered other alternatives, was it someone else who was sick or something bad was happening in a relationship?   When I reached Tom a few days later, he was his predictable self; upbeat, optimistic and cheery.  After catching up, he said, to me, “I wanted to talk to you because I have something awkward to share with you.”  I thought I was ready, but what Tom shared, I didn’t expect.  He proceeded to tell me that he was reading purposed worKING a week plus ago and he was reflecting on how long he had been reading the blog and that day’s post just happened to stick in his mind.  And then, a few days later when reading along, he recognized that something was wrong.  You see, Tom (and maybe he was the only one, or maybe there are others who also recognized but didn’t want to point it out to me) saw that I had jumped from day 2099 to day 3000, thereby skipping 901 days.  To add to my embarrassment, I actually had published a special post for day 3000 that remarked on what it felt like to have written 1,000,000 words.  While Tom and I had a chuckle about how easily the brain can mix and mess up numbers, I was reeling inside at my mistake.

So, here I write an apology and am having to go through my own restatement.  And with this humbling experience, I am reminded once again that God is graceful and He and I have had our own good laugh about even with the best of intentions that we all fall short of the perfection that we wish we could achieve but that He is always there to pick us up and carry us through. Restatements and all.

BTW, this is day 2105.  🙂

Reference: Romans 3:23 (New Living Translation)