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 1491: Staying Among Ourselves

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“Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.)”

I’d forgotten how clique-ish college can be.  As I was in many classrooms last week and would start each session with getting a sense of who was in the room and where they were from, I was reminded of my own college cliques and how certain groups, whether from the same majors, the same hometowns, the same Greek life organizations, or the same country would travel in packs.  As I finished a week plus of speaking/teaching, the last session was a lunch of about 25 business school students.  On the right hand side of the long boardroom table, there were six students sitting in a line, all from China.  On the other side of the table were three students, all three from South Korea.  And then there were girls sitting with girls and boys sitting with boys.  It’s as if someone told them to segregate themselves.  They were just staying among themselves.  This same thing happens in the workplace as we watch cliques get created all around us.  We then wonder why some people don’t get along with others, or seem to have weak relationships.  If we stay among ourselves, we don’t really grow and we miss the opportunities to learn something new and different from others.  We should be on the watch for developing cliques and when we see them, do all we can to break them up and send people out and into other groups of people.

Jesus never stayed among those who would have been predictable.  He could have “cliqued” with any of the religious leader groups.  But, instead He didn’t become one of any group, He instead pulled many who were different from Him in and then kept them out and among those who were different. That’s why God’s message is so powerful.  His love and Word doesn’t stop at any boundary or any group of people.  He, like He modeled for us, transcends all personalities, socioeconomic,  demographics, backgrounds, successes and failures.  As we walk through this day, are we ensuring that we are also doing the same and not just staying and keeping His message just among just ourselves?

Reference: Mark 2:15 (New Living Translation)