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 2023: Creating Aspirations

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“God blesses those who are humble,for they will inherit the whole earth.”

As we settled back to burn off calories from the Christmas dinner by watching TV Sports on Christmas afternoon (humor), I was reminded that in the early days of the NBA playing on Christmas Day that there were players who were disgruntled to have to “work” on Christmas Day.  This year, ten teams played on Christmas Day and players were excited to be able to “play” on Christmas Day.  A full set of generations now aspire to do what their basketball forefathers dreaded.  And, what does that say to us?  Tom Sawyer taught us this a long time ago.  Take a fence that needs to be painted and make the painters feel valued, meaningful and “popular” and they will not only paint the fence, they will do so with pride and enthusiasm and maybe get others want to do the same.  What do we have that we can make the “best of jobs” so that we can have people aspire to perform?

As we say goodbye to 2015 and look forward to 2016, let us remember that in front of us will be many moments at our jobs where we will be asked to do “work” that would not be our first choice in how we want to spend our time and energy.  But, someone else thinks it is and because we work for and with them, we may not get to choose “what” to do, but we get to choose “how” we go about it.  What we can never know is that the “how” we go about our work, could be the example that in the future become the aspirations of others.  When we pay attention to how we accept and work on things that we don’t like, with total humility, we can be making a much larger statement than we know.

Reference:  Matthew 5:5 (New Living Translation)