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 339: IBNO Status Revisited

The week before last I wrote a four-part post on how we need to constantly be checking our IBNO Status (our In But Not Of Status). I received a number of emails about these posts and it appears that the struggle of being in but not of is one that permeates just about every work place and person who is trying to live and work to God’s Purpose. When it is all said and done, it is not easy to walk the earth and have all of the messages that come at us all the time and stay true to our values and principles, which, may sometimes overtly and sometimes subtly run counter to the ways of the world. The hard part of this is that for many of us in our work lives we don’t want to be thought of as abnormal or not “with it”. If we are too far outside of the normal then we become ineffective in what we need to do day in and day out. As I am now reading the book of Acts I am more convinced than ever that one of the reasons why Paul was so effective was that he had lived in the world for such a long time that when he decided that he would no longer be of it, that he knew how to relate and be seen as a person who others would respect and follow regardless of his beliefs. It seemed like he won over people no matter where he was in the world. That is our challenge as well. I ran across this poem by e.e. cummings that describes the struggle we all face:

“to be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

I don’t know in what context e.e. cummings wrote that poem, but it rings true that in the checking of our IBNO status, we need to be cognizant that the fight is always there, the battle rages on and that our struggle goes from day to day, and all of these are winnable because we have God with us today, tomorrow and forever.

Reference: Romans 12:2 (New Living Testament)