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 1977: Bands of Superheroes

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“Your pride and joy, O Israel, lies dead on the hills! Oh, how the mighty heroes have fallen!”

We are superhero crazy again.  Everywhere we look there is TV, movies, graphic novels, and online stories that are featuring superheroes.  Yes, we all love a superhero but what we fail to recognize, especially in the workplace is that most of the fictional superheroes have one dominant super-power and one obvious weakness.  And so the best writers figured out how to create “bands” of superheroes like The Avengers, The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, or the The X-Men that balance each other and collectively, make them (seemingly) invincible.  Yet, what we do at work is try to make everyone great at everything, looking for Supermen and Superwomen….not allowing someone to be amazing at one thing and then banding them together with others who have their own extraordinary talent or strength.  Yes, we should try to fill our companies with superheroes, but maybe our job is to focus more on the band than trying to expand one person.

The Bible is full of heroes of faith.  Our church in San Francisco spent the entire summer examining the lives of many of them and with each hero came a flaw that in some cases nearly took them down.  And, yes they were each just like you and me, all depending on the one superhero, being God, to save them from themselves when their weakness overwhelms their strength.  God wants us to be heroes of faith in our workplace.  But, he doesn’t expect us to be superheroes.  He takes care of that for us.

Reference: 2 Samuel 1:19 (New Living Translation)