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 985: The Power of Choice

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“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…”

Few companies or organizations are so singularly minded that they offer only one product or service. They may start that way, but over time someone inside the organization will come up with another offering and the rationale of extension will be about giving their consumers and customers more choice. We are a people of choice and much of the foundation of capitalism is built upon the ability of those who are spending to be able to make that choice.  That is why we have closets full of clothes we never wear. It is not that we need those garments, it is because we need the choice. Getting it right for our extra offerings is never easy.  We have all watched many a company flounder with the decisions of what they should offer next.  Remember Crystal Pepsi?  Need I say more.  Providing choice is great, choosing what that choice should be demands the rigor and discipline of analysis, surveying, testing and retesting.  Choice for just the sake of choice does not usually end well.

Our God is a God of choice.  Our humanity started with a choice being given and a bad choice being made. From that point on we have desired choice and struggled from decisions of the offerings in front of us. We are given choices all day long and we choose many times to make it through the day.  Some of those choices are huge and some small.  Some are clear and some are murky.  Some are long in the coming and some have to be immediate and on the spot.  Regardless, God says that within each of these choices we must remember who we serve.  He will be there with us through our choices and He asks us daily to return to Him for the wisdom He wants to impart upon us.  He does not want us to choose unwisely.  All we have to do is continuously remember that He is always our first choice!

Reference: Joshua 24:15 (New King James Version)