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 3K35: Let It Go

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“Jesus answered, “My Kingdom is not of this world.”

How many times have we gotten stuck on a point or a deal term and we know we should just “let it go” but we hold on longer than we should thinking that the other side will blink, only to find out that they don’t causing us to lose the deal/argument.  And, to only now feel bad/guilty that we didn’t make the first move.  Had we, we might have not felt we we were the losers, instead the ones that catalyzed the successful completion of a transaction.  This happened recently in one of my portfolio companies who were negotiating a new real estate transaction.  After hanging on too long for a capitulation by the other side, the property was lost to another suitor.  It stung to lose the property, but it stung worse to lose it because of not being willing to look past the one point of contention and just “let it go”.

The great writer, Oswald Chambers, had this quote from his devotion book, My Utmost for His Highest: “External detachment is often an actual indication of a secret, growing inner attachment to the things we stay away from externally”.  What Chambers is telling us is that the closer we grow to God the less the external things of our lives and world will matter to us.  In fact, maybe what he is telling us that the closer we are to Him, the more we can “let it go” with all the things that once consumed us and seemed so important.  There is a spiritual maturity at work here and one that we should strive for so that we can make it through our days, weeks, months and years focused on what really matters and the rest of it, let’s just “let it go”.

Reference:  John 18:36 (New Living Translation)