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 3K89: Hitting Mung

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“Be still, and know that I am God!”

Last week I wrote of the “Lie Flat” posture to work that so many are today taking.  But, not everyone wants to just check out but they are seeking a way to not have a “mind stuck in perpetual motion”.  Mark Ellwood of BusinessWeek wrote of the phenomena in South Korea called “Mung”.  Mung is about slowing down, clearing our mind and getting to what Mark describes as “proactive blankness”.  How would one do that?  Well, the Mung has people going into movie theaters for a 40-minute movie called Flight which is nothing more than what we might see if we stared out our airplane window for 40 minutes at the clouds as we passed them.  The idea is to empty one’s mind to give it a rest.  Where this leads to is what is called ART (Attention Restoration Theory), which sounds new, but we all do it at one point another when we take that walk in the park to clear our heads or get lost in our thoughts as we stare at the burning fireplace.  What is new that there are now businesses cropping up that give us a place, space and time to try and find the restoration from our perpetual pounding upon our brain.  It might be something to practice, but maybe not quite at work just yet.  We’ve come a long way but 40 minutes of taking up a conference room to stare out the window into the sky might still be a little away from being readily accepted. 🙂

Sometimes God calls on us to be still so that we can know Him.  It may be one of the hardest challenges for those of us who are driven to succeed and achieve.  Could it be today that we are to take a step back, slow down our minds and find a place where we can hear what God is trying to say to us?  He will meet us where we are, so let’s take the time to give Him our stillness.

Reference: Psalm 46:10 (New Living Translation)