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 3K26: Positive Control

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“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

At one time train conductors had to keep the throttle pushed down actively with positive control for the train to continue to move forward.  That was so if they fell asleep or had a problem the throttle would pull back and the engine would slow.  Recently, that has not been enough so new regulations have it that, like many cars once the throttle is released the train is going to break.  That seems like a long overdue solution.  My Tesla does that when I take my foot off the gas pedal and if I have the car in auto-pilot and I don’t keep my hand on the wheel with slight pressure it will disengage and even not reengage until I stop and start the car for a new trip.  These are the things that have to happen to conform to human nature.  Even Microsoft is going this route.  Someone in the Product or Engineering team must have gotten fed up with people mistakenly being on mute during their Teams Video Conference calls as they are implementing a positive control to speak.  It’s like talking into a walkie-talkie when you have to depress the talk button to be heard.  So, get ready to soon have to hit one or more buttons to be heard.  I just hope its not the combination of CRTL+ALT+DEL. 🙂

It’s not easy to have positive control in our lives, but we must strive to do so if we are to live out our lives as God has challenged us to do.  Our Faith walk can easily be distracted within our work as we are surrounded by those things and people who do not share the same values and approach that we are taking.  So, we must constantly keep a positive effort in place that keeps us where we have less chance of coming off the tracks.  We do that through the daily refreshing of God’s Word and also surrounding ourselves with others who check in on us to be sure that we are maintaining and growing.  Today, let’s ask ourselves how is our positive control for Him being put into practice?

Reference: James 1:19 (New Living Translation)