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 201: Chief Learning Officer

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I have been helping a good friend of mine source a Chief Learning Officer for his company. The fact that the company is committed enough to learning and teaching their employees to put someone in charge of just that says something positive in itself about what is important to the company. Many companies give lip service to keeping their employees learning and developing but in reality the first budget to get cut in a downturn is training and development. The job specifications for a Chief Learning Officer, beyond the required academic credentials, are that the person has to be sensitized and very attuned to the needs of others and to what competencies and skills the company will need to continue to grow and expand. The person also must have sophisticated influence skills to be able to respond to the needs of others in ways that the receiving parties will accept and adopt the feedback and teaching. Not everyone wants to learn and grow and sometimes it takes someone else to be the mirror for them so that they can see where they have opportunities. The Chief Learning Officer is also a “go-to” person. That means that they are approachable and someone that others, because of their knowledge and their personality, would seek out to be there for them when they need counsel and advice on how to better themselves. This person wears many hats but none more important than being a trusted counselor to all that they work with, using their expertise to be the leader of betterment of people. As I think about this more, doesn’t God want us, in our jobs, when pursuing our purposed to also be His Chief Learning Officers? In Hosea 4:6 he says that the problem with his people is that they don’t know enough. He says: “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.”. What he is really saying is that the people don’t know enough about Him and don’t know Him personally. Every day we go to work with God wanting to be there with us. He wants to pour over spreadsheet with us, to be on the sales call, to participate in the weekly meetings, to be involved during the difficult conversations, etc. But for any and all of this to happen we must have a first-hand knowledge of Him and be able to pass that knowledge along to others through our words, examples, and our actions. To be a learning officer we have to first have the knowledge to impart. Think about this today as you head out to work. What knowledge and learning do you have that you can impart to others so that they see Christ reflected in your work? As you inventory your knowledge base, do what the Chief Learning Officer does, see the gaps and outages of knowledge and then make a plan to go gain that knowledge. From there the real learning begins.

Reference: Hosea 4:6