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 2836: Who Are We Building For?

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“Unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted. Unless the Lord protects a city,
guarding it with sentries will do no good.”

The discussions about corporate values and culture are again frequent and loud.  I personally wish they were always frequent and loud, as the attention to values, principles, mission and the supporting culture should always be front and center and never subordinated.  But, we tend to think that once we’ve built out what we desire the culture to be, that we are done.  But, if anything, when we get stark reminders like what we again have now, we should learn that we should always be testing and challenging ourselves against our assumptions and actions.  For too long we have focused more on “what” culture we want to build, versus asking ourselves “who” are we building the culture for?  When we sit with that angle, then we might be able to discover the blindspots we have and possibly the large gaps that we never realized were so prevalent.  Right now is when we need to go back and do our reevaluation!

Consider that we are the architects of us and we become the general contractors of our teams and we (personally and professionally) are building companies and careers.  Then we must ask ourselves too, “who” are we building for? Are we building our lives for Him?  Are we calling upon Him to protect what we are building?  Or, are we building for the wrong reasons and leaving ourselves and what we’ve built vulnerable and in need of protection.  Here is what we know, if we truly are building for Him and all that God stands for, then the fruits of our efforts will be evident and those fruits are good, just, respectful and fair. And when we see, feel or say the opposite, then we need to step back and do our own reevaluation to be sure that are realigning to where we need to be.

Reference: Psalm 127:1 (New Living Translation)