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 1225: Out Of Tune

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“They marched into Jerusalem to the music of harps, lyres, and trumpets, and they proceeded to the Temple of the Lord.”

I was on an airplane and thought, “I’ll watch a movie.”  I scrolled through the Samsung tablet that I was given and nothing really caught my eye except for the movie, “A Late Quartet”.  I’m a big Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken fan.  The thought of that much pure acting chops in the same movie seemed worth the watch.  The premise of the film is that a string quartet celebrating 25 years together is falling a apart because of many life reasons, with the catalyst being the character played by Christopher Walken contracting Parkinson’s disease.  There are a lot of messages in the movie but one that has stuck with me is what can happen when one instrumentalist is out of tune, or out of synch, and what happens to everyone else.  What occurs is that everyone else will begin to play and tune to the one that is off key or off rhythm, thus destroying the sound of the whole. This happens everyday in our jobs.  There will be someone who is off of their game, off color, offsetting, off of strategy, and the rest of us will “tune” ourselves to them, versus collectively staying strong and true to where we know we are supposed to be.  Teams get weak and fall apart because of this phenomena.  It’s worth having someone or someway of consistently checking and tuning back to true so to not let one person, or one team cause everyone else to go astray.

This can so happen to us in our spiritual lives as well. We can get pulled out of tune by the world and those around us who are the most influential.  We can learn two things here. One is that we are to always be on the watch and listen for where we are in our lives.  If we fall out of tune because we have followed where others have gone, then we need to go back to God’s Word, prayer, church and fellowship to find our way back.  But secondly, and just as importantly, we can, if we are vigilant and we take this as part of who we are to be, we can be the countering true tone to the off tune nature of those around us.  When others are feeling lost in the score of life and they can’t seem to find where they should be or what tone they should pursue, we can provide the example of a true and purposeful way to pursue.

Reference: 2 Chronicles 20:28 (New Living Translation)