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 357: Stop Asking!

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I’ve had many an employee in my career who has been one of those people who are always asking for something. If you have never met someone like this (and I would be surprised of you haven’t) they are quickly identified as the “squeaky wheel”. They are the first people to be in the office wanting to know why someone else was promoted, or why another department got the larger budget, or why they weren’t involved in a meeting or asked to travel on a trip. They are usually also the first people who point at others for problems and are not quick to take responsibility for their own action. I might add that they are usually the most immature. I once had a employee who would ask me regularly about when would they be promoted to the next level. When I got down underneath these incessant requests it had nothing to do with needing more salary or that their career was suffering from being in their current position too long, etc. What it boiled down to is that this person had a sense of entitlement that grew out of insecurity and fear that they were going to miss out on something that they wouldn’t get unless they asked. I contrast this employee with a very senior executive who I worked with in the early 1990’s who kept getting promoted over other people because he kept his head down, never expressed his career desires when not asked, trusted “the system” and when promoted would show a level of humility and gratitude that was far beyond anyone’s expectations. As such, it was fun to see this person get promoted and rise through the ranks all the way to the top. How often are we more worried than trustful in what happens to us? Yes, that is right…too much. When we stop trusting and we stop letting others and God do what they would like to do with us and instead try and take control of the situation, we miss out on the gifts that want to be given to us. With my employee, I got to the point that I knew when the conversation was coming and I didn’t look forward to those talks. Our God is a God who wants to give so much more to us than we could ever ask. Our God is the God of David who as we know wrote in Psalm 23:5; “…My cup overflow with blessings.” With a little more trust and little more faith and a lot less trying to tell God what to do, we can expect our cup to flow over. But, if we keep asking God to fill the cup in the way we want it filled, he will fill it, but maybe only to our definition of the top which could be far from hie definition of what he wants to give us.

Reference: Psalm 23:5 (New Living Testament)