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 191: Your Confidence Index?

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We read about them once a month; there is the consumer confidence index, the retail confidence index, etc. Confidence indicators and indexes give us some feeling of whether things are better or worse. We do the same with other people to get a read on how things are going around us. At work we look to those who are the leaders or in-the-know to see how confident they are feeling and then we extrapolate that to our own feelings and we are either up, down or neutral in how we are thinking about the future. Some people are just confident by nature and they see the glass as constantly bubbling over and it being their glass for the drinking. We naturally gravitate to those people, until they cross the line and confidence turns to over confidence and maybe even arrogance. We all need to have a healthy dose of self-confidence to be successful at work. We start each day knowing that we will have to defend and prove our work and ourselves so having some self-confidence becomes part of the requirements. But, we need to be careful that we don’t become so overly confident in ourselves that we forget about others, ignore our faults, or lose perspective of what we can and can’t do humanly. Those who are over-confident in themselves always set themselves up for a big fall when something doesn’t go their way or they are impacted by something that is out of their control. We are warned about being overly self-confident by James beginning with Chapter 4, verse 13: “Look here, you people who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.’ How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog – it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.’ Otherwise you will be boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil.” We sometimes get so caught up in our own confidently set plans that we forget that our plans are nothing but desires that can get swept away in a moment. One event out our control and our plans are washed out. We need to continue to look to God for the bigger plans that He has for us, allow our self-confidence to be checked by looking to Him first, and then let the rest fall into place. Today as you think about your future career and work plans, try putting them to Him first and see what He wants to do with you, then you can be confident in Him not just in yourself.

Reference: James 4: 13-16 (New Living Testament)