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 3K23: Shadowboxing

So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing.

I like to watch when boxers are warming up and they shadowbox.  As a kid I loved watching Muhammad Ali shadowbox around the ring before a fight.  It was cool to see.  But, when he was all warmed up and ready to fight, each of those punches were thrown with purpose, a target and an objective.  I sometimes wonder if in work we spend too much time shadowboxing as perceived effort but in reality we go about our work without a real purpose and target to be achieved.  Today’s productivity tools have gotten better at measuring what we do, but can’t provide the why and the purpose.  Without those, we might be doing a lot but are we really only shadowboxing?

Paul had a purpose and he was about as disciplined and on-point as anyone else.  He recognized the difference between practice and getting warmed up (shadowboxing) and doing the real work at hand.  When he became able to have that discernment, he could make deliberate choices on how he spent his time and energy going about God’s work for him.  It begs the question for all of us; do we know when we are going about the purpose that God has for us, or are we only shadowboxing so that it looks like we do?

Reference:  1 Corinthians 9:26 (New Living Translation)