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 1100: Where You Sit Is Where You Stand

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“But the Lord’s plans stand firm forever; his intentions can never be shaken.”

There has been even more talk about Yahoo!’s decision to remove telecommuting from their benefits for workers.  BestBuy followed suit last week with the removal of their flexible work program called “ROWE” (Results-Only-Work-Environment).  I remember back in 2005 when they introduced this program.  It was designed by two employees and it became a very positive PR and recruiting tool for the company.  The program was written up in every business magazine and was received very positively for BestBuy’s forward thinking and innovation in the workplace.  Now, less than 10 years later, the new CEO is debunking the whole program and calling it a “failure”. All of the accolades are being refuted by new management, once again proving that where you sit is where you stand.  Now that BestBuy does not sit in the seat of success, they are looking inwardly to change. I didn’t have any problem with Yahoo!’s decision to bring back the telecommuters, but I will say that BestBuy’s declaration that a set of leadership principles that allowed people to focus on results and productivity and hanging that out as the problem with the company, might be stretching it a little too far. We have to be careful in how we conceive and deploy broad-based leadership and work programs as indeed times and needs do change, but it’s never good to be caught looking like you are going from guardrail to guardrail for each of these changes can bring a loss of credibility for leaders and for the next program.

We can rest assured as believers that God’s plans will never change.  That is one thing we never have to worry about.  He sits and stands in the same place today as He has forever and all He is asking for us to do is to stand with Him. Are we standing with Him today or are we sitting someplace else that is causing us to change our stance?  As we go to work today and do all we can to bring glory to Him, let’s consider where we are sitting and standing. If we don’t like either or both, then let’s use today to start making the necessary changes.  He will guide us and lead us to the right places if we only lean on and ask Him to be there with us.

Reference: Psalm 33:11 (New Living Translation)