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 726: Yielding

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“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure. It is also peace-loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others.”

Business doesn’t like to yield. It is not unusual to hear a CEO say, “We will not yield to…(fill in the blank).” Not yielding can turn ugly as unless someone does, someone is going to get crushed and the collision is going to hurt someone, if not both parties. I think back on the days of Apple and Microsoft when neither would yield and they battled in the marketplace for decades without cooperating. At the end of the day, one company won for the first two decades (Microsoft) and then later the other one won (Apple), although Apple did yield and allow for Windows to be installed on their computers after all. But who in the end run was hurt? It was actually you and me and anyone who used a computer. For many years we suffered through bad operating systems on substandard hardware all while there was an okay operating system that couldn’t do everything we needed to do for work, sharing, etc. sitting there on fantastic hardware. I went through the days of using a Mac inside of a corporation, only to finally have to switch over to a PC because the company no longer would support MacOS, nor the hardware. I believe at the time, this was circa 1996, we were the last major American company, outside of Apple, who had been 100% Mac. The point of this is what would have happened to us over all of those years had the guys at the top yielded a little to each other? I can imagine lots of years of higher productivity and maybe even accelerated development creativity had the yielding occurred. Businesses, large institutions, and government are all invited daily to yield. We may never see when they do, but we certainly see, hear about, and feel when they don’t.

The same is true in our lives. What James is telling us is that if we seek the true wisdom of God what we will find is that our spirit should be one that yields to others. It’s so hard to do. That’s why James tells us that we need to seek to be that close to God so that we can. When we yield to others, we are living the example of Christ. When we put ourselves and our own agendas continually first we are missing out on part of the wisdom of God that He wants to give us. Think today about where you are harboring an unyielding spirit and what changes would you have to make to just let it go? There is nothing wrong with yielding. You might even be surprised what you learn when you let someone else go first.

Reference: James 3:17 (New Living Testament)