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 517: Pick Your Work Friends Carefully

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We aren’t always fortunate enough to choose who we work with on our jobs, but we do get to pick our friends. We may be limited by geography, departments or some other reasons but in most cases we still get to choose who our friends are at work. Our friends say a lot about us to others and our friends, whether or not we know it or not, have a huge influence on who are and how we act. I remember working with a person who became a work friend and we all hung out together. He was funny and smart and he had his own sayings about things and before long we all were saying all the same cliches that he said. Some of them were good things and some were bad things. The point is that we chose our friend and before long we all had picked up his habits. For those outside of the clique I am sure now that it looked like Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. The same can be said about what can happen to us when our friends are not such happy people. We can also get dragged down from the attitudes of others and become associated with these attitudes too. In Proverbs we read; “Don’t befriend angry people or associate with hot-tempered people.” We need to be careful about who we pick as our friends as they become an extension of us and they also become more influential to ourselves than we may know.

Reference: Proverbs 22:24 (New Living Testament)