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 202: Subsidized Food

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One of the things that companies will do as they grow is decide to bring in house food service and start to provide on-site cafeterias so that employees can eat throughout the day and not have to leave the work place. This is good for employees and also for the company as it relates to productivity and efficiency. I learned over the years though that if you are trying to turn your company cafeteria into a profit center that it is impossible to do so. In order to be able to provide the quality of food that will keep employees wanting to eat on location versus go out to eat means that there must be enough choices and variety to make it attractive. Once you start adding all of that, then it becomes unaffordable as an offering to the employees so the company must then subsidize, or underwrite, the cost of the food and service. And from there, you then make the ongoing decision of how much subsidy against how much you want to offer to the employees, etc. In some ways this becomes one of those areas where once you start, you can’t stop and no matter what you continue to do, it might not be enough and no one ends up happy. Many a company has come out of the shoot with free food for everyone, all the time, only to pull back on that promise when times get tight. Each pull back breaks a little more of the relationship contract with the workforce and a new story is created about the times “when we used to get free food”. It can be a bad cycle. Anyone who has led a business understands that what you do with the perks and promises is an important set of management decisions and also a slippery slope. Many of these fall into the camp of “better never to start than to start and then stop”. And believe me, food, snacks, candy, soda can be the lightning rods for these emotions. I was working at a division of PepsiCo when the company decided no more free Pepsi…everyone would now pay a quarter a can. You can guess the reaction. All of this reminds me that we, as people, whether rightly or wrongly, are always looking for the free lunch but at the same time we more so don’t want to be given something and then have it taken away. Fortunately, we are all given the greatest food subsidy imagineable by God. We are given the greatest food and drink, at a cost that will never borne by us, and never taken away. We see this in John 6:35: “Jesus replied, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Today, all of us and our co-workers are hungering and thirsting for something that we cannot describe but we know it when we hear others and ourselves wanting for more in our lives, our jobs, and our relationships. No one on this earth can subsidize that “food” to our total expectations. Each one of us, if we expect that to happen will be disappointed. We need to look to only God for that subsidy. He underwrote all of this for us long ago. As you work today think about what God has provided for each of us and how satisfying all of His offerings can be if we only choose to accept them from Him. The cafeteria at the office may fall short of our expectations but God’s food will more than satisfy!

Reference John 6:35 (New Living Testament)