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 757: Occupying

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“People who are at ease mock those in trouble. They give a push to people who are stumbling.”

Across the country, someplace today is being “occupied”. We happened to be in NYC this past weekend for a Memorial Service of our friend’s son and decided that while we were there to go see what was up with the Occupy Wall Street movement and live-in. It was not what I expected (smaller and less organized) and I really couldn’t tell what will be the outcome, if any, from the protesters. What is evident and worth noting is that people are angry, and since they can’t pinpoint who to be angry with, they are lashing out at an institution and socioeconomic classes that are not their own. They are doing what we all do when we get angry, we first blame someone else. This is what we do in business too often, we wait to see who is in trouble and then we get on that band wagon. We “occupy” until we get our way, or until someone listens. The problem with this is that it doesn’t always solve the problem, in fact it may just cause another problem. It’s hard work to not just go after the obvious target, but instead to search for the root problem and go solve that. That’s what we need to be doing.

In our lives, and our work, where we are to be examples, we have to be careful that we don’t become occupiers too. It is human nature to jump in and mock others and to give a nudge to those who are already stumbling. But, we are to be the opposite. We are to defend those who are in trouble and we are to lift up, take home, care for, and provide the help for those who have fallen to get on their way. We are living in a wacky time, but imagine a world, and a workplace, where we don’t allow the troubled and the downtrodden to be walked over or kept down, instead imagine a place where we stood over them and did all we could to be sure that they found their way upward and onward. We may not be able to immediately solve what is happening in the “occupying” world, but we can manage and solve the problems that we have control over and see each and every day at work. Today, let’s not take the easy way out, but instead give a hand to someone who is stumbling.

Reference: Job 12:5 (New Living Testament)