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 2055: Boundaries

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“But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden—except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”

Things work well at work, until they don’t work well or don’t work at all.  And, 99% of the time, if not every time, it is because of the decisions and actions of a person. There are errors made, which we all make and most can be gotten over, but there are actions taken that are harder to forgive and these are when someone crosses a boundary. It’s at these moments that we want to pull our hair out because we can see, right in front of us, things unraveling, getting messy and emotions peaking, all because one person decided to step outside their boundary.  Why are boundaries important? Well, imagine a swim meet competition with someone crossing swim lanes? Or, what happens when we decide to cross driving lines without warning or regard to the cars behind us, or the cars coming directly at us? There are boundaries for a reason and once we all know what they are, then we are better off staying within the boundary we have been given with any deviations being well-notified and agreed upon in advance.

As believers, we must accept that God has put boundaries on us. While God makes us free, He does not give us all-access no questions asked passes to what our world entails. God’s boundary on us is sin. We all do it, but He tells us clearly ahead of time what the boundaries look like and then we make our own choices about those boundaries. But, here’s the good part. Inside the boundaries we are closer to Him and this life can be fuller and more freeing than anything we can ever imagine. The other day I had the image of temptation being like standing on one side of a fence. The fence is not so tall that we can’t easily step over it. On the other side is something that looks so good, so inviting, so enticing that all we have to do is take one little step over and it is ours.  But, when we do our feet immediately sink into mud that wasn’t there when looking from the other side. And then we have another choice. Do we quickly pull our feet up and get back to the other side, catching our breath like we just escaped danger? Or, do we stay on the other side only to have our feet slowly sink deeper and deeper making our escape and return harder? And, this is why God sets the boundary for us in the first place.  And let me not end this without also reminding anyone who feels sunk beyond escape or return, to just reach up today and ask God for the pull of His forgiveness. He is right there, waiting to pull us out, clean us off, and gently return us to His side.

Reference: Genesis 2:16-17 (New Living Testament)