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 1951: “You Had One Job”

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“Whatever you do, do well.  For when you go to the grave, there will be no work or planning or knowledge or wisdom.”

There is a Twitter meme called, “You had one job”.  It basically pokes fun at those who had a job to do that seems relatively simple, but because of lack of attention, or something else, the job gets messed up and it is just funny to imagine that it would happen.  It’s a little crass, but you’ll get the idea when you see the picture of the toilet seat in a public bathroom that was installed with the cover part below the sitting part.  Who would do that and why?  We never find out but it’s not unimaginable that someone was having a bad day, or was being rushed, or wasn’t given the right directions (although hard to imagine in the example given).  My first job out of graduate school was at a place where we built airplane engines.  Even not knowing much at all about corporate work, I could see that every day people came to work with their own problems, issues, concerns, and distractions and that any of those could cause, and many times did cause, mistakes to happen and then rework to be required.  While an improperly installed toilet seat can be inconvenient and funny, one job not done correctly in an airplane engine can cost lives.  Until humans are not a part of work, we need to consider that humanity can have a large impact on how that work gets done, or not.

Whatever our earthly work is, we are serving God well when we do it to our best and with the greatest attention to detail, quality and achievement.  We might be wondering what are we doing to make a difference, but look no further than the work in front of you to know that when our best is being done, God is pleased.

Reference: Ecclesiastes 9:10