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 330; IBNO Status (part 2)

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I once worked at a company where no one felt comfortable wearing blue jeans to work. There was no rule or policy against it and quite the opposite in that the company prided itself on having a casual dress policy. But it would be the very rare day when you would see a senior executive or anyone in management wearing a pair of jeans in the office. Recently I saw a video of an internal meeting of the same company and I commented that all of the senior team were wearing blue jeans. The person who was showing me the video said, “yeah, we all wears jeans these days, almost every day.” What was the difference? When I was at the organization the CEO then never wore jeans to work and if someone did, he wouldn’t say anything, but he would give them the once over look and would look at what pants they were wearing just long enough that it would let them know that he was frowning inside. Today, the same company has a different CEO and he is known for wearing jeans to work all the time, even though he never did back in the day when he was number two in the company. The point of all of this is that we very easily become the products of our environment. Just like chameleons we can quickly change based on the landscape and the backdrop around us and if we are not careful we will have changed and not even known it. It’s nothing new to any of us that we change over time in small increments that begin to add up. It’s like gaining weight. Few people just wake up one morning and find that they are overweight. It’s the pound here and the pound there that leaves us with 20 extra pounds that has to be taken back off more diligently than how it was put on. So are the things in life that can cause us issues regarding being in but not of this world. Our “IBNO Status” must constantly be monitored. There are many traits and characteristics of others that are fine to take on, but there are others that we have to monitor and not just do because everyone else does them or the person at the top of the company does it that way. Not knowing or recognizing how we have changed is the first sign that our IBNO status needs to be checked.

Reference: Romans 12:2 (New Living Testament)