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 2946: Reentry Part 3: Step By Step

“Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path.”

Great distance runner and now writer/coach Amby Burfoot wrote of a runner who spent 15 months training in Ethiopia.  The motto the runner learned was “Enkulal kes ba kes be egirua tehedalech”, which means “Step by step an egg learns to walk.” How true!  As we consider our process or reentry, and we should think of it as a process, there will be many steps to go from what we have been used to, to what we will be asked to do next.  It will be the small steps that matter as much as the larger ones.  We had dinner outdoors with friends on Saturday night.  They were a half hour late. Their reason was that they’d forgotten how long it took to get really ready to go out.  Small things.  Small steps we will relearn, but it will necessitate patience on our part.

God wants to lead us and for us to follow Him, but He has never laid out a grandiose plan for anyone and then delivered it to them to pursue.  He provides vision (such as there was a promised land and there is a Heaven) but He expects us to follow Him daily, one step at a time.  There is comfort in that.  Imagine if we knew how our lives were to unfold and then the pressure of having to never make a misstep.  The idea of following one step at a time is a few missteps won’t throw us totally off of course but instead allow for us to gently correct back into His path.  That’s right, step by step.

Reference: Psalm 119:105 (New Living Translation)