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 2095: Picking Up The Scent

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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.”

When we are onto something, or getting close to what we are pursuing that has been eluding us for some time, we might say, “We are picking up the scent.”  This comes from hunting dogs that would hunt and track, like foxhounds or bloodhounds.  These dogs are trained to pick up the scent and then they take their intelligence and inbred olfactory skills to do just that.  We’d like to think we can train people to pick up the scent of business success and decision making, but we can’t. We can provide pattern recognition, experience and training, but those who can pick up the scent are rare.  If we are lucky enough to have someone on our team who has this skill, don’t ignore them.  The scent won’t always be right, but it’s worth listening to what they have to say.

The world is full of scents and we must be careful that we don’t allow ourselves to pick up the wrong one.  This is another reason that Jesus said that the way to Him is narrow. The scents of freedom, independence, self-reliance, achievement while in themselves are not all bad, if they become our paths then we run the risk of moving astray from our Father and making decisions that are of our world.  Our enemy would like nothing more than today provide us a scent that pulls us away.

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