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 59: Kingdom in the Ordinary

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You have heard me before speak of those who lament that they don’t know if they are living their life to the fullest and doing a higher calling because they are not in the ministry but instead are in the marketplace. We already know that God did His work through ordinary people of the Bible and many of them were ordinary workers at some points in their lives. We also know that each of us are to search independently to find God’s will in our own lives and then learn to adjust and obey what it is that He wants us to be doing. As we draw closer in our relationship to Jesus we will find what the will of God is for our lives. In the book Experiencing God, Blackaby says, “God reveals His ways to us because they are the only means to accomplish His purpose”. I find that quote to be very inspiring because as I search for God’s will knowing that the marketplace and business is what I am about and what I do, knowing that God will reveal His purposes to me and that He needs me to be doing what I do because in me (and all of us) this revelation of His ways is the only means to accomplish His purposes is both inspiring and comforting. That means that as we each seek our own purpose in our lives and work, that God is wanting to use His purposes to unveil our purpose, thereby making it one. So, as we think of our work and what we do day-to-day for all of those hours we can hold fast in the promise that the purpose of God can be manifested through our work. This leaves us with that important lesson that if we are to accomplish our purposes that what we do is less important than how we do it. God gave his disciples ways to do their work and He taught them, as we teach those who work for us, how to get the job done. We can learn many lessons from these teachings with the an important one being that when Jesus spoke to His disciples and asked them to do the things He wanted them to do, more often than not they questioned and sometimes scoffed at how Jesus wanted the job done. No better example of this than when Jesus commanded the disciples to feed the multitudes. The disciples wanted to nix the effort but Jesus instead was specific on what they were to do, and when they did it, a miracle occurred. Could it be that God is asking you to go about your work differently than you have in the past and He wants you to be an example in your workplace of how someone can work differently when they work with God as the determiner of your purpose? Might it be that how you have gone about your work has not been the best demonstration of how God can be in someones life as they go about their ordinary day-to-day work? Remember, He wants to use each of us to reveal His purposes. All we have to do is be willing and obedient to let that happen. Can today be the day that we put aside the rest of the things that get in the way and we start anew?

Reference: Proverbs 19:21 (New Living Testament)