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 156: Chief Legal Counsel

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Most corporations today have either in-house or external legal counsel. With the litigious society we live in, it is almost a requirement. In public companies just the compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations alone can keep multiple attorneys fully-employed. I always had a great relationship with the legal teams I worked with. In most cases they weren’t too conservative or only about just saying “no”. Instead, they were wise about risk management, forward-thinking about potential legal moves that might be made against us and strong counsel when it came to internal issues on how work within the law with people. Way more than once in my career I have seen legal counsel keep the company out of legal problems or public embarrassment. Not everyone in business has had the same good interactions and experiences with their legal teams. Sometimes we can feel like the legal aspects of the business tie our hands and that we can’t get much of anything done because the advice and counsel is to not take any risks whatsoever. It would be wise to heed the advice and the counsel of your chief legal counsel. We all know that we must stay within the lines of the law and that when we don’t we run high risks. We have seen many examples over the past few years of executives who have broken the law and are now paying for their transgressions. We all are faced with choices within the gray and we need to ensure that we know the line between right and wrong and we stay within those lines. Not only because right is right and wrong is wrong, but also because we know that others are watching and following our examples. God has given us many laws that can keep us right within His eyes. Within His word we can find the lines that we need to ensure that we are not going awry or astray. But, we must pay attention. We are told this in Romans 2:13: “For merely listening to the law doesn’t make us right with God. It is obeying the law that makes us right in his sight.” Today, you may need to call upon our legal counsel, I mean the true “chief legal counsel”, to guide you through a difficult choice or decision. Know that the counselor of all time sits on your side and you can, and should, call on Him at any time for the best advice and counsel that you could ever receive.

Reference: Romans 2:13 (New Living Testament)