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 1240: Stripping Down!

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…let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up…”

I’m in the process of buying a software business.  It’s a great service and as we look at what we need to do first it is not what most would think.  The first thing we need to do is to strip it down.  What does that mean?  Well, it like building an airplane.  The designers of an airplane build it out with all kinds of great features and amenities, but at some point all of those get weighed against the size of the engine and the thrust available to allow the plane to get off the air, and stay in the air. Because the engines are what they are, there is only thing to do, start stripping away the features until everything comes in balance.  The same has to happen to this service I am looking to purchase. The same has to happen to all of our businesses. It’s not easy as we can get very attached to features and before long they can become sacred cows.  Last week Bill Gates apologized for every letting Control-Alt-Delete get built and put in their routine.  He knows now that they should have stripped the feature down to one button. What are we hanging on to that needs to be stripped down?

We each have traits and ways of being that when pushed to name them we would say they are identifiers of who we are.  The question we must always be asking ourselves is whether or not those “features” are ones that are strengthening us in our relationship with Jesus, or holding us back.  Like the plane that can’t take flight, or the software that is too feature-rich and sluggish, we have to have the courage to strip down these areas of our lives so we can bound forward for Him.

Reference: Hebrews 12:1 (New Living Translation)