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 3K42: Growth Masks A Lot

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“He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more.”

I first heard the phrase, “Growth masks all problems” when working at Frito-Lay in Dallas.  The company had been growing continuously year over year, for decades.  But, in 1989-1990 the growth had slowed and all of a sudden everyone was paying attention to areas in the company that had not been closely managed before.  The new Frito-Lay CEO, Roger Enrico, who had been transferred from Pespsi-Cola, gave a presentation to the company where he made the statement mentioned above.  I never forgot it.  For the next two years after Roger took over, it was one area after another that came under the microscope until he’d found more than $100 million dollars of wasteful spending that had been masked and looked over because the overall top-line numbers of the business were growing.  When growth stops, that’s when the problems become evident.  It’s what is also happening in the world around us.  Growth in our economy stopped and the next thing we know, we have problems all around us that didn’t seem to be there before.  But, the question needs to be asked, were they there before and just being masked and now we are finally seeing them?  Don’t get me wrong, I love growth.  Growth is where the fun is and we all have to aspire to grow our businesses, or we will wither and dry up.  And yes, with growth we can still not overlook, or sweep under the carpet the problems that are being masked.  It’s not easy to do both, but if we are responsible leaders and stewards, it is our job to be done.

What problems did we have before that were masked because we were busy, flourishing, taking on new assignments, jobs, projects and everything was clicking into place?  What problems are we seeing now, or have seen over the past 18 months, that we need to take care of before we return to growth mode?  There is hard, organizational and introspective work that we all have to do to be sure that we are ready for growth and also ready for when the growth is not there.  Jesus spoke bluntly about the need to prune for growth to occur.  Maybe that is what He is asking from us today.

Reference:  John 15:2 (New Living Translation)