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 1139: Know It All?

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“Well, then,” Jesus said, “the citizens are free! However, we don’t want to offend them, so go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin. Take it and pay the tax for both of us.”

Every company and organization has those who “know it all”.  In fact, we call them that; “Know it alls”.  We probably learned this term when we were kids.  But, back then we probably said this out of jealousy because the kid on the front row with the hand up probably did know it all.  But, in business we run into people who are “Know it alls” and they are not very popular because as we all know, no one knows it all.  In the workplace, those who think they know it all are also the worst listeners and have a very high ego.  What we also know is that being the “Know it all” is a dangerous place to sit as the first day that they are wrong there will be plenty of people ready to point it out and dethrone them. It’s never a good thing to be a “Know it all” and no company does well with allowing these people to have too much influence.

We never want to be known as “Know it alls” either.  It is the opposite of what Jesus taught us to be.  When Peter and Jesus were talking about taxes and Jesus told Peter to go fish (his profession) and that Peter would find a fish with a coin in his mouth, you can only imagine what was going through Peter’s mind.  I know I would have wanted to say, “Hey Jesus, in case you missed it, I’ve been fishing for a long time and am pretty good at it, and with all due respect, fish don’t swallow coins and if they did, the chance of me catching one that has one in its mouth, well, you might just want to keep that idea to yourself Jesus”.  But, see if Peter had said that, he would have been trusting on his own knowledge and not the knowledge of Jesus.  In this case Peter wasn’t a “Know it all”!  And thankfully he wasn’t as we then learn of another miracle of Jesus and the lesson that each of us should never trust in our own knowledge before trusting in His first!

Reference:  Matthew 17: 26-27 (New Living Translation)