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 1975: Where’s The Meeting?

purposed worKING No Comments
“Truthful words stand the test of time, but lies are soon exposed.”

 

As I wrote earlier this year, I read up author Charlie Feld’s book on former PepsiCo Chairman/CEO, Wayne Calloway.  Wayne was all about results, but only results that came with integrity.  Like many leaders it’s easy to talk about results and the desire we have make those results better and better, but it’s hard to talk about integrity and what it means, especially if we feel that we might be called out on our own integrity.  Wayne Calloway was not afraid to talk about integrity, what it meant, and most importantly, recognize it when he saw it and no matter how hard, call others on it when he didn’t see integrity in action.  He did this because he knew that results without the balance of integrity become results at all costs and this how companies and people get damaged. So, he pushed hard on integrity and one element of this was, “keeping the meeting within the meeting”.  What he meant was that if we are going to have a conversation, disagreement, agreement, decision or debate that it should happen in the meeting, with everyone present, and not in the hallway or later when small groups would go do their own thing. I’m as guilty as anyone of having done this, but Wayne’s reminder is a good one in that when we take the meeting outside of the meeting we are not practicing high integrity.

I probably don’t have to write much more than the above for us to get the point.  Our integrity must trump all else if we want to truly work to the purpose of bringing glory to God.  It’s a small thing, to be on the right side of keeping the meeting in the meeting, but it could also be a huge thing for keeping or losing the perception of our integrity.

Reference:  Proverbs 12:19 (New Living Translation)