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 772: Do The Right Thing – Part 4: Body Scan

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“Or don’t you know that your body is the temple of of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? you do not belong to yourself…”

In the business world when we think of what we own, we consider the hard assets that we have on the balance sheet like buildings, equipment and hardware. We also can own intellectual property. We own cash assets too. But we don’t own the people in our organizations. Or should I say, we don’t own the body of our businesses. Although, we can too many times forget this and begin to act like we own the body, no one can own another adult in our country so in a certain term we can only borrow or rent the body of our companies. This begs the question of how we treat those things we own versus those we rent. Imagine how nice hotel and motel rooms would be if everyone treated them like they owned them? Not to be. The same can happen to us in our businesses. We can abuse our bodies and not think much about it because we look at them as assets that can be replaced with someone else. Companies that continue to think this way over time will ultimately never grow to what they could be. If the body is abused, it will stop growing and eventually die. We should be doing body scans in our companies, functions, departments and teams. No, not the type of body scan we get when we go through airport security, but instead scans to reveal our true body health and a sense of confidence that our people want to grow with us.

The Bible tells us that our physical bodies are not ours and that we are only “renting” them from God for a season. But my how we abuse this gift of God! We act like they are rented, until we get sick or the abuse catches up with us and then we are angry that God would allow us to falter. We have to take our bodies seriously as they are indeed the temple of God. Think about it. How does God’s work get done on the earth? Yep, through you and me. If we are not at our best spiritually, intellectually, relationally, and physically, can we bring the full glory of God to those around us? Of course we can’t spend all of your time and thoughts on keeping our bodies in tip-top shape. If we do that, we run the risk that we will even put our physical nature and appearance as a priority above our relationship with Christ. But, that said, we are challenged and told to respect our bodies and yes, to be sure that we are always scanning to make sure that we are respecting His temple.

Reference: 1 Corinthians 6:19 (New Living Testament)