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 1960: Wordsmiths

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“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Tom Stoppard, the playwright, wrote this in his play, “The Real Thing”; words are, “innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos”.  Stoppard’s quote reminds me of how little we value the wordsmiths within our companies. We tend to want to leave the wordsmiths in the communication or PR departments all the while we bungle through our words resulting in conflicts, misinterpretations,  misrepresentations, hurt and hard feelings, all because we have ignored the power of words to cause damage, sometimes irrevocable damage.  Last week, ESPN fired a radio host for his choice of words. We have national debates of character over the words that politicians use.  With just a little more respect and attention to how we use our words, we can turn negative to positive, insult to caring, oppression to freedom.  Let’s consider how we wordsmith within our company and our word choices.

You might think I am heading in the direction of James and Paul in how they teach us to use our words, but I’m not.  I would like us to think today about how our words can either ripen the fruits that come from the Holy Spirit, or cause those fruits to never ripen, or worse to rot.  Take a look at each of the fruits described in Galatians and consider how we should be asking God to help us wordsmith our lives so that we can bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit.  If we are struggling with our words, then we are surely struggling with how the fruits are being borne out of our lives.

Reference:  Galatians 5:22 (New Living Translation)