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 2811: Good Or Nothing At All

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“Then Balak said to Balaam, “Fine, but if you won’t curse them, at least don’t bless them!”

Right now, the last thing we need is another person who just wants to say bad things about others.  I did my own experiment of political TV (across all channels) to try to find anyone who would say something good about someone who was not “their person”.  Guess what I found?  Not only is that impossible to find, but 95% of the talk is all about saying bad things about other people; it seems like they are directed to do so as much as they can.  What happens in the media, finds its way into the workplace.  Or as we know from growing up, it if is happening at home it is happening at school.  Now that we have work at home (and school at home) we can bet that what is on the TV in the background or in the foreground is shaping how we go about our work.  My advice, if we can’t say something good about someone, we are better off saying nothing at all.

The Priest Balaam wouldn’t provide the curses that King Balak wanted him to make.  After a number of tries, the King finally just said, “Look, if you can’t give the curses, then do me this, at least don’t give them a blessing”.  Basically, just say nothing at all.  Balaam didn’t stop with his blessings, which means he was on the right program; just say good things, no matter what.  But, we can’t always be like Balaam as much as we want, but we can certainly ignore the requests for us to say the bad things.  It’s going to happen to us to today without a doubt; we are going to be pulled into one of those pile-on conversations and the choice will be ours as to participate or not. Just consider this, does God really want us to be the one who joins the rest of that crowd?

Reference: Numbers 23:25 (New Living Translation)