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 47: Heart Of The Matter

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Core to the way we live and work is our ability to assess other people and ferret out who is who and what is what when it comes to people. At work we end up doing it continuously with interviewing, bringing on new members of our teams, getting a new boss or transfer subordinate, meeting a new external partner, or evaluating a new vendor, etc. Being able to make good people assessments and decisions is part and parcel to success in the workplace. I would argue that most times, it is this ability that separates the great from the good. So, we get trained and we come to our own assessment process whether it is formal or informal. At the end of the day we more often than not will choose to like those people who are most like our selves. That can be good and that can be bad. I have spent most of my career with a focus on becoming great at spotting, attracting and promoting talent. The number of people I have personally interviewed is in the thousands for sure. And even then, after all of these years, it is still an art for me, not a science. So, still today I look for the better ways to be able to assess people and talent. God gives us a word on what is really important about people. Of course, we are not God and so we are not capable nor are we to think that we can judge other people, but the example that God gives us in the book of Samuel does say something to us about what is really important about people. We are told in I Samuel 17:7: “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” Think for a moment how differently we would assess and evaluate people who are looking to join the company or the team if we were capable of looking beyond the outer appearance and instead be able to delve into what is in someone’s heart like the Lord can do. We know that we can’t see into someone’s heart, but we can surely, through the way we assess and question, get past the superficial things and get to the core of who someone is and who they want to be. We can spend our time and energy with someone around their values, principles and dreams. It has been my experience that we want to work with, hang with, and go to battle with, those who are aligned with our own values, principles and dreams. In fact, we can be very, very different in our personalities, our experiences and our approaches, but if we are aligned at the core with each other, that it all works out to the best. Might today or this week be a time when you are going to be assessing someone else on behalf of the company or for some other reason outside of work? Would this be a good time to change your approach and spend more time trying to get to the heart of the conversation, to the heart of the person, to what is really, really important?

Reference: 1 Samuel 16:7, (New Living Testament)