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 1003: Indifference

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“…so be diligent and turn from you indifference.”

Indifference is a killer in business.  Whether it be a company that becomes indifferent in their attitude towards their customer or quality, or internally when people become indifferent to their work product or to the people around them.  Regardless, if you want to see a company go quickly down the toilet then look for indifference.  No better place that we have seen that in our lifetime than the American car industry.  Once at the top of their game by miles, over decades they let one company, or country, creep in at a time and bring to the consumer new and fresh concepts, leaving themselves behind and without a way to catch back up.  When the Japanese saw the rising cost of gas in the late 1970’s they responded with smaller and more fuel efficient cars.  Detroit stayed with the gas guzzlers and lost multiple decades of sales. Some one would say this happened because of the blindness of arrogance.  I would take it further and say that indifference was also a part of the problem. It might have been arrogance at the top, but anything you read or hear about during those times had the American car worker feeling, a the best, very indifferent.  Gone was a sense of pride.  Gone was the motivation to work harder and more efficiently.  Gone was the trust of senior management that must be there for innovation and risk taking to occur.  Where new companies would open, like Saturn in Tennessee or Subaru in Indiana, those workers were far from indifferent.  They wanted to win.  The point is that indifference is a silent killing disease and one that must be constantly watched for and avoided.

We know where indifference in our spiritual journey will take us.  The whole lukewarm thing doesn’t have to be restated.  It’s easier than we think to become indifferent and we need to constantly protect ourselves from waking up one morning and feeling indifferent about our faith. When things are good, it’s more likely to become indifferent because we begin to take for granted what God has done for us.  The danger in indifference is not only to ourselves but those around us who might see us slipping back into old habits or not being the person that they knew us to be that they counted on as an example and inspiration in their own lives.  Today, as we head into the place where everyone is always watching, our workplaces, let’s be sure that we are not being indifferent in our faith, but instead being intentional and committed to Him who brings it all together for us.

Reference: Revelation 3:19 (New Living Testament)