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 309: A Long Walk…

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I’ve been known to say that our careers are much like running a marathon, because just like a marathon, being 26.2 miles, a career of 26.2 years (and more) is no matter how you add it up, long. And we don’t really run our careers, we more walk them through and do the best we can to keep at it when the hills are in front of us, when we are in the valleys and when the long, unbending road in front of us seems only to end where our eyes can’t see any further. This is our career. It’s a long walk for all of us regardless of what our careers are and how many changes we have along the way. And in some years, like this one, I know of many people who have felt like it has taken all they have to just keep one foot in front of the other. My favorite movie of all time is Lawrence of Arabia. I don’t know why, but some of the scenes in the desert and the long journeys that they take in that movie have always stuck with me. Maybe because the movie is so long too, I don’t know, but I know that I have felt on more than one occasion that like the movie, the future was nothing but a mirage on the horizon and that there couldn’t possibly be that much distance between here and there. One foot in front of the other has been a mantra for me on more than one job and one part of my career. Our careers are long walks that if we don’t know where we are going and why, can for many days, weeks, months or years, seem intolerable. I wonder if this is how the Wise Men (the Magi) may have felt in the middle of their journey to see Jesus. Here they were, three men who decided to follow a star, a light in the sky, to see where it shone, to see if a prophecy was true. I have often wondered why others didn’t do the same. If there was this bright light in the sky and there was legend, lore, prophecy that this would happen, why didn’t many more didn’t follow to see, if for nothing else, if the prophecy was true? My conjecture is that the three wise men were not the only ones who traveled to find the star, they were the just the only three who finished the journey. If it was like theologians and historians say it was, this was a multiple year trip, that was far from easy and in fact was from such a distance and terrain difference that the scenes in Lawrence of Arabia would look easy. Suffice to say, it was a long, long walk and only three finally showed up. We can take a lesson about our careers from the Wise Men. They followed what they believed to be the light and the steps of the Lord. They did not give up. They did not turn back and while they may have doubted along the way, they showed up in a spirit of appreciation, awe and gift-giving. Every day in our jobs we take steps along the way, steps that can be leading the right way, or the wrong way. Regardless, it is a long, long walk that we are on and if we don’t follow the light we have been given, if we don’t persevere, if we don’t stay true to the real purpose, then we will miss out on the gift-giving that comes from giving glory to God in all that we do. There was a reason we call them the “wise men”. They gave us a lesson of wisdom that we should never forget.

Have a very Merry Christmas eve and truly wonderful Christmas Day!

Reference: Matthew 2:1-2 (New Living Testament)