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 159: Spring Cleaning

purposed worKING 1 Comment

At least once a year it is a good idea to do a spring cleaning of our offices. We tend to accumulate, gather, and before long we can’t get another file in a file cabinet or the IT person has to come over and show us how to archive our e-files and folders. Is it human nature to just “hang on” to stuff? I was once taught that the only way you can really clean out is to go get three boxes and put them on the floor in the center of the office. The middle box is for everything to go into before any decision is made. That means everything has to come out of the cabinets and drawers and go into the center box. Once all the drawers, cabinets and closets are totally empty and the center box is full (or overflowing) then you go through the center box with either the chosen file papers going into the trash box or the “out” box. At last resort the file goes back into the drawer or cabinet. The trash box is exactly what it means. It’s the trash. The “out” box is a box for files to keep but they need to be out of your office and filed somewhere else. And then what is left over is put back neatly and there should be plenty of room to now spare…that is until next year. Our lives are like this as well. We go through times where we feel like we are all cleaned out and then things start creeping back in and before long we are filled up with the wrong stuff again. We then need to get out our proverbial boxes and do our spring cleaning. We are told in Philippians that we need to be sure and discard along the way in our lives if we want to be truly fulfilled; “For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ.” It is springtime and a good time to take an evaluation on whether it is time to spring clean. I suspect it is. There are surely a number of relationships at work that need mending, habits that need to be broken, thoughts that need to be removed, etc. The garbage box is waiting and God has His hand on the “out” box as well to help you figure out what to do with those things that you don’t know what to do with next. When you are spring cleaning the office this year, think about using that time to also do a thorough cleaning of all aspects of your life.

Reference: Philippians 3:8 (New Living Testament)