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 2959: Assessing Personalities

purposed worKING No Comments

“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these… But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

There is so much work being done on the matching of employees and culture that it’s hard to stay on top of the latest.  I’ve even got a project of my own going on that I think is pretty unique if anyone is interested. It’s hard, scientific and intuitive work to get it right.  I’ve learned a lot about this area.  The “Big Five Test” ( which is said to be the the gold standard among scientists who study personality), assesses people on these five traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, open-mindedness, and neuroticism.  How they boiled us down to these five is over my pay grade (no P.h.d here), but I can see how these are distinctive identifying areas to be understood. I’m also fascinated in how any of these Big Five tend to get exacerbated by situation or environment in the moment.  I know that my own personality can vary around those five as different issues arise.  It’s good that we are cognizant and sensitive to who people are and what is going on around us as we think about matching and grouping people together.

I’ve copied above the Fruit of the Spirit and also the verse just before, which I like to refer to as the Rotten Fruit Not of the Spirit. As we each assess how we show up and work better with others, can we try harder to be sure that it’s the Fruits of the Spirit that others see in our personality?

Reference: Galatians 19-23 (New Living Translation)