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 1432: M.I.T.s

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“Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

There is vision.  There is strategy.  There are goals.  There are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  And, there are Most Important Tasks (MITs). MITs are the granular things that must be done, that when added up, get us to the goal and the performance we are looking to achieve. Most organizations leave the MITs to expectation that they will happen.  Few identify and manage these.  But, those organizations that demand operational excellence know that the achievement of MITs cannot be taken for granted.  A good friend and I were running this last week and he explained how his company looks at MITs so closely because they have learned that inspecting what they expect is what ensures that things will get done.  We each have MITs that we are staring at, getting them done, but maybe not as crisply and well coordinated as we could and know we should. It only takes a couple of missed MITs and the a whole of wrong can happen.  Do you know your MITs?  Do you have a plan and accountability to get them done?

We can easily get overwhelmed in our work and lives.  There are so many things we are to do and so little time to get it all done and as we get stressed too many times we start trying to “muscle” our way through, only to find that we can’t seem to get a grip on what we should do first.  And then we stall.  Sometimes we can feel that stall in our spiritual like as well.  When Jesus speaks to us in Matthew and sums up all the laws into two commandments, he cuts through it all for us and gets to the MITs (if you will) of our heart so that we don’t have to get overwhelmed or lost in our where we should put our focus.  As we start this week, let’s get our MITS in order and hold onto them firmly. Our consistency in being able to hold ourselves in alignment with God’s commands, allows us to have a strong foundation to build and work from.

Reference: Matthew 22: 37-40 (New Living Translation)