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 2052: Bottlenecks

“When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he asked, “What are you really accomplishing here? Why are you trying to do all this alone while everyone stands around you from morning till evening?”

When there is lots to be done and all the decisions, work, and flow get stuck with one person, we call these people, “Bottlenecks”.  If the neck of a bottle narrows then the flow goes slower and the same thing happens with workflow.  There are certain people who just need to either delegate or get out of the way, otherwise they become the bottleneck that hold everyone else back.  We know who these people are and if we are one of them, people know that as well.  Organizations run better without bottlenecks but it takes courage and commitment to identify and remove the bottlenecks that slow everyone else down.  A huge improvement would be just to make the removal of bottlenecks a priority.

It took Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, to get Moses to stop being a bottleneck.  Moses was trying to to do it all and He was holding up his people and it wasn’t until Jethro called him out on it that Moses changed his ways.  We each can be bottlenecks and never realize that we are being so.  What we might need is our Jethro, who will call us out and tell us the truth.  Our Jethro can do more than that as well.  She/he can hold us accountable to living the life that God calls us to live.  So, it’s a good challenge to determine if we are a bottleneck or not, but even a better challenge is to find our own Jethro.

Reference: Exodus 18:14 (New Living Translation)