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 1117: Battery Problems, Part 2: Power Sources


“May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.”

Not only is Boeing’s problem with the Dreamliner batteries the fact that a small thing has become big, it is also that the battery problem is source problem and in this case, the power source. When the battery in our car fails, the alternator will help it hold a charge for a while, while the car is running.  But once stopped and the battery is dead, then the car won’t restart.  This is the same problem with the Dreamliner, except that in the case of an airplane, once the battery goes dead, or burns up, well, in mid-air that is a lot worse than what happens in our cars.  Power source problems are big problems. We know this when the electrical power goes off.  We also know this when some other source of power for our businesses like a person, a deal, a customer, an investor, etc. runs out of power.  We can’t ever become too dependent on singular sources of power. Backups, defaults, new sources should always be in the making. If we sat down and mapped out all of the power sources within our companies or organizations that are at risk, we would probably begin to think differently about what we need to do next to ensure that we don’t encounter failures.
I was listening to a Pastor recently who described the four signs of power source problems in our lives.  He said, they were: “Fear, Frustration, Fatigue and Failure”.  He detailed each one of these and pointed out that if any of these are overtaking and controlling our lives, or if we are obsessed with them, that we are experience a “power source outage”. I was moved by his words, because God did not intend for us to live without power that He came to give us.  He says many times in His Word that He has power to give us, if only we will allow Him to give it to us. Here’s the thing, God has His own form or power that He controls and distributes.  In some ways it is like alternating current in that the more we realize we are powerless without Him the more He will give to us.  If we decide that we are going to work and live on our own batteries, which can deplete quickly, then we run the risk of red-lining into fear, frustration, fatigue and failure.  God does not want us to run on our own batteries, He is asking us today to plug into His unending and never interrupterable power source.
Reference: Ephesians 3:19-20 (New Living Translation)