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 692: “How Could This Have Happened?”

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“An enemy has done!, the farmer exclaimed.”

Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media magnate is well known for his statement to his management team, “Bury your mistakes”. It’s actually not a bad strategy, if you have the money to do it, and you also take the time and energy to understand what caused the mistake in the first place so that you don’t end up repeating and then burying the mistake again. But sometimes, like what is happening in the UK right now with the NewsCorp newspaper organization, the mistakes, when surfaced, can be so obvious, that all you can do is ask yourself, “How could this have happened?”. There are times when the finger-pointing, deflecting and blaming doesn’t do any good, and if we are honest with ourselves, we know that what happened is that we took our eye off the ball and we let something slip by us and it became a way of doing business and it really is bad when it catches up to us. NewsCorp is not the first, and won’t be the last. What looks like a single mistake, like an oil well explosion, turns out to be a safety and reporting systemic problem. We all have these hidden mistakes waiting to happen, and we have to be diligent to constantly be evaluating and assessing where these weak points might be.

In the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, the King had a legitimate excuse to what was going to be a big problem. He had an enemy who decided that the best way to thwart a successful harvest of the wheat was to fill the King’s fields with seeds of weeds. When realized, they surely had to ask, “How could this have happened?” But, when the King found the reason, he didn’t panic, he didn’t try and cover it up, he didn’t look for the scapegoat, he made the best of it and he made sure that everyone knew that for a while it was going to be ugly and unpredictable, but that at harvest time it would all work out. We need to be more like the King in our lives. The weeds are just part of our lives and there isn’t anyone to blame or get angry against. Instead, it is us that we have to manage and stay positive with our lives being the example of the wheat that an can grow and thrive, even among the weeds. If we spend too much of our time and energy (both which are precious), asking “How could have this happened?”, then we are not listening to the consistent and always present answer that is coming from Him.

Reference: Matthew 13:28 (New Living Testament)