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 2848: Future Tense

“Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before or after his time.”

With all the controversy of what monuments of people should stand and which should be taken down, it is a good reminder that the legacy of our lives, our companies, and our brands are daily being written. We cannot control what the future tense will be or how the future will interpret anything of what will one day be our past, but we can control today on what it is that we are contributing to the story that will be told.

The Books of Kings is filled with one King after another who gets remembered as either good or bad. There was one king, King Ahaz who “did not do what was pleasing in the Lord’s sight.” He joined a long list of those remembered like him.  And there was another who was bad, but not quite as bad, which I also chuckle at God’s backhanded compliment of King Hoshea who “did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, but not as much as the Kings of Israel who ruled before him”.  And then there is King Hezekiah who received a legacy statement like no other King. We are not Kings, but we do have rule over who we will be in the sight of the Lord.  God will write our ultimate epitaph so we have to daily ask ourselves, which kind of ruler of ourselves do we want to be?

Reference: 2 Kings 18:5 (New Living Translation)