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 293: Sense Of Direction

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Work takes good sense of personal direction and yes, it would be ideal if there was an “app for this”. But there isn’t. It just takes good common sense and emotional intelligence to navigate through the complex weave that are organization structures and people relationships. It’s an odd combination that takes us as people and places outside of our home and comfort zone into a place where we know some (but maybe not all) of with whom we work and we spend our time and energy against objectives that we don’t really own (unless it is our own business) but instead we kind of “rent”. My nephew who has graduated college and now working in his first real job is reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. While I personally disagree with Ayn Rand’s totally self-centered and atheistic beliefs of Objectivism, I still love the book as there are good challenges to us as “workers” in her literature around how we each need to be productive and adding to a collective innovation to better work and companies. My nephew is looking at his own job through this lens and wondering if he really is making a difference or not. I don’t think that he is alone in that question. Work is complex on so many fronts both physically and emotionally. It many times boils down to the complex nature of people and who we each are and what makes us up. We each, each day, add or subtract from that complexity by out attitudes, cooperation and spirit of teamwork. It is no wonder that it takes a great sense of direction to navigate successfully through a job. And when we are faced with that complexity and how it can sometimes overwhelm us to the point we don’t know which way is up, we should stop and marvel on it and praise God for making it all so intriguing and interesting. David writes out of his difficult experiences and turns his needing for direction into a praise in Psalm 139:4; “Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! your workmanship is marvelous – how well I know it”. David found his sense of direction within the marveling of the complexity. Today, you may be facing a navigation issue at work. You may not know which way to turn with a problem or with another person who you are struggling. Or you may be wondering, like my nephew, “what am I really doing here”? In those moments, remember the words of David and praise God for the complexity and the workmanship. May God give you the sense of direction you need to make the complex simple and to allow you to navigate with confidence.

Reference: Psalm 139:4 (New Living Testament)