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 57: The Facts Please

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Don’t you just hate when the person at work takes snippets of information, doesn’t have the whole story and then either tries to give advice, tell you what to do, or worse yet takes what he/she knows (which is not all the story) and goes and stirs something up by telling others? It happens all the time at work. We get an email that doesn’t tell everything that happened and we take the information we have and run with it. The same with conversations we have with others. We can take what we have heard and then because we are in a hurry, overwhelmed, up against a deadline, or just don’t care enough, we don’t dig in deeper and then we end up representing something not quite right and it ends up becoming a bigger issue than it needed to be. Part of working with purpose is being a person who stands for and represents the truth. Everyone can respect the truth. They may not like the truth, but truth cannot be argued against and those who tell and represent the truth will be respected. But to get to the truth, it can take work and patience. It can take having to listen longer, ask more questions, understand the context of the situation and ensure that all sides of the story have been revealed. We are to be truth seekers and truth advocates. When we don’t get the facts we run the risk of falling into the ranks of the foolish. Proverbs 18:13 says, “What a shame, what folly, to give advice before listening to the facts.” We can start right now, today, with building our advice on the facts and doing whatever it takes to get to the root of the situation or issue by relying on the facts and the facts only. The facts are the evidence of the truth and when both have been stood up for, we can expect that we have done the right thing to stand on the higher ground. So, know that we have to work a little harder and dig a little deeper. It is part of the responsibility given as God’s workers.

Reference: Proverbs 18:13 (New Living Testament)