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 238: Silence Is Golden

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Have you ever noticed how more finger pointing happens at work than maybe any other place other than an elementary playground. All day long, work conversations are filled with; “She didn’t do it right”, “He never got around to it”, “He really dropped the ball on this one”, “She didn’t know what she was doing”, yada, yada, yada. All day long the fingers come out and point and accusations are leveled against people. And, we all buy into it because it is such a normal course of action. It doesn’t seem at all out of the ordinary to talk about someone when they are out of the room. I was recently in a Board meeting where you would have thought that every problem ever known to the organization was because of the performance of a recently departed executive. Some of it was true, but the rest was like when the CFO says we are going to need to take a financial charge this quarter, are there any other things we should be writing down or off? All of a sudden the spending that was the big idea last year, comes out of the woodwork to be written down or off as a failed expenditure, etc. And because, it’s okay to take a write-off, we just lump it all in as fast as we can. That is what we end up doing with people as we pile-on and make accusations. It becomes natural to just fuel the fire. One day though those accusations come back to us and we are the ones who have to answer to others. How to handle those accusations is critical. I have watched too many people lose step in their careers, or throw away their careers because they don’t realize that most of these accusations and words are meaningless in the bigger picture and to let them take us at of our game, or off our purpose, is exactly what others want, and what we must avoid. Jesus gave us the best example of this. At the moment He was being accused and persecuted, He chose to keep Himself lifted above all of it, and stay on His purpose. He did it with silence. We read in Matthew 27:12; “But when the leading priests, and other leaders made their accusations against him, Jesus remained silent.” Jesus said nothing. He knew that their accusations against Him meant nothing in the bigger scheme of things and to have opened his mouth to argue or debate would have only been to lower Himself to their level and lose the high ground that He stood upon. The same is true with us. Today, the accusations that are so broadly thrown around in the office will come your way. The best reaction, may well be no reaction. Today, let us test the gold within silence.

Reference: Matthew 27:12 (New Living Testament)