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 494: The Intangible Gifts

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I was on a panel where the first question that was asked of me was beyond the core skills that someone has what do I look for when interviewing someone as it relates to the soft skills or the intangibles? My answer came in four parts; 1) I look for an alignment of a person’s value and principles to the values of the company. Getting down to the true values that someone lives and works by can tell you much about the person, including even whether or not they consider their values and principles to be driving influences for them; 2) An attitude of achievement and winning. Work is about winning and battling the competition of the company and to achieve there must be an attitude and passion to win; 3) The ability to play well with others in the sandbox. This is the teamwork that we have been reading about the last few days. The ability to be a good team member and team player is essential; 4) And finally, the ability to communicate with others. Especially in a small company, or a start-up, if one can’t communicate what she/he is doing and do so in a way that others understand and want to follow or support, then it doesn’t matter how good they are at what they do, they wall fall short of their full potential. How do we describe these intangibles, other than call them intangibles that are hard to teach and sometimes very hard to discern and evaluate? Peter talks about some of these as “gifts” that come from a great variety of spiritual gifts, many which, have been defined for us in God’s Word. However, since God made us all and put us here on this earth to bring glory to Him, then we can look at all of our talents and skill as gifts from God that are to be put to work, for Him. In 1 Peter 4:10, we read; “…Manage them (gifts) well so that God’s generosity can flow through you.” Are we using our gifts today well enough? Are we using our gifts to the point that can feel that God’s generosity is being magnified and flowing from us? Consider today that the talents, the skills, the set of experiences that we have been given are the intangible gifts of God that we get to open each and every day and like we marvel and are excited about any new gift, we need to make the most of them, today and every day.

Reference: 1 Peter 4:10 (New Living Testament)