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 3K220: Humiliating

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“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor.”

We’ve all likely been in a position where we’ve made a mistake and someone else has had to dig in and figure out what was wrong.  I remember it happening to me early within a new job I had and as the numbers my team had come up with were significantly wrong, the finance team had lots of fun pointing out the error and then questioning everything else in the spreadsheets.  To say the least, it was humiliating.  It took me a long time to earn the credibility back and I had to listen to a lot of razzing with each subsequent presentation.  But, I/we got over it.  It happens.  We may be very sure about something and then find out that we were wrong (I wrote a little about that last week) or we just blew it.  Just as important to how we resolve the issue is how we respond to it, and the attitude in how we recover.

Last week, a good friend, David, said within a meeting we were having, “You can’t be humiliated if you are humble.”  I told him on the spot that he’d just spoken a life lesson for all of us.  We know that God expects humility from us and that doesn’t come naturally in the human spirit.  We have to work hard at it.  Imagine that David is so right that if we are humble enough, nothing can be humiliating.  This doesn’t mean we don’t care, it just says that we can be open and accepting of criticism, investigation, challenges, etc.  I want to be so humble that I can never be humiliated!

Reference:  James 4:10 (New Living Translation)