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 1317: Being Wrong Will Always Be Right

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“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.”

One of my favorite business bloggers, Seth Godin, writes: “Assume your plans are wrong”.  He is referring to our inability to predict the future when we look more than a couple of generations out.  In his predicting of wrong, he is so right.  Whenever we become beholden to plans that are more than a decade out, we are probably going to end up disappointed because of the change that occurs around us that disrupt those plans.  And then add on generations of changes of leadership and personnel and who knows what will happen.  Ask Bill Gates about this as he readies to return to a more active role at Microsoft.  The company that he sees today is a far cry from the company that he founded and while he may know a few familiar faces from the old days, the executive suite is now filled with people that he wasn’t together with in that first foxhole. We should plan strategically.  It’s important we do so, and we need to try and look as far ahead as we can.  But, the attitude that goes with that far-reaching strategy needs to be open-minded enough that if things begin to change tomorrow, then we are willing to toss that plan out the window and redirect without remorse or frustration.

There is only one course for the future that we can be sure and that is God’s course for us. In that we will never be wrong and we can always be assured of being right. We can never go wrong in keeping close and in God’s will. We may wonder, “Does God really care about our careers, or our jobs, or even the spreadsheet that we have been slaving over for the last week?”  In actuality, He cares a lot, because He cares about us and what we do, how we do it, and how we do it with others, was all created by Him.  I believe He rejoices when we live and work to our full potential and like a parent, he hurts for us when we hurt.  But, He cares most fully in that in all that we do we put our trust and life in His hands for Him.  God doesn’t clock out on us when we go to work, He stays right with us waiting on us to call upon Him.  God has a course for us and if we marry our heart with His, then that course will always be right.

Proverbs 4:23 (New Living Translation)