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 195: Motivation

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Companies try many techniques to motivate their employees. It is a broad gambit of offerings that we might experience such as; incentives and contests, dinners, off-site meetings, bonuses and even sometimes bringing in an outside motivational speaker. These speakers are people who are great at grabbing our attention, honing in on an area of our lives that needs improving and then through their own examples or the examples of others show how we can improve and be better. There are many people who make their living on delivering these motivational speeches. Throughout the years I have been asked to speak at meetings and conferences and even when I am tasked with speaking on something of mundane training substance, I can’t help but to also want to leave behind a motivational message on how the people in the audience have a responsibility to make things better for the others around them, and that starts with them improving themselves first. I don’t know if it is all that effective, but I usually leave more fired up. 🙂 Maybe that is why there is that old adage, “he who teaches, learns twice”. Regardless, we all need to be motivated by others every now and then. It would be great if we didn’t need external stimulus to get ourselves going and find a higher gear, but that’s not the way it works. If you don’t believe that people look for external motivation, then just stop by a bookstore and look at the size of the self-help, self-improvement category. It’s big and seems to be growing while other categories are shrinking. Since people look to others to be motivators, then why don’t we, as believers who are trying to work a purpose, think about filling that role in our companies? Actually, God wants us to be a motivator of others. We see this in Hebrews 10:24: “Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.” To motivate others to acts of love, caring, thoughtfulness, service and good works would be a noble ambition and a significant role for each of us to grab. Imagine the good that could be done within your office if you were to bring this type of motivation to your team? Not only would you feel like you were “learning twice” and receiving the extra motivation as you watched others feel inspired, the effect on others would be tremendous and I suspect that morale would go way up in your team, office and maybe even the whole company. Why don’t you use today to try and bring some new motivation to work? It certainly can start today and start just with you!

Reference: Hebrews 10:24 (New Living Testament)