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 2810: Throwing Hand Grenades

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“Jesus always used stories and illustrations like these when speaking to the crowds. In fact, he never spoke to them without using such parables.”

There are people who are awesome “hand grenade throwers”.  They seem to have a sixth sense on just the right time to throw the grenade to cause the largest commotion or damage and they are masterful at being just far enough from the situation that they can’t get hurt by the flying shrapnel.  But, the collateral damage can be extensive.  They are people who aren’t tasked with working on something, or have never gotten involved but love to criticize and question to the point that others who are working on the project get discouraged or frustrated until they just want to give up.  As examples, these are some hand grenades that get thrown all the time, “That is going too slow”, “That is not how I have seen it done in the past.”, “I wonder if we have the right person leading this?”, “It doesn’t appear from where I sit that there is alignment within the team on this”, etc. Some would call it passive aggressiveness, but it’s not passive, it’s very active and it’s become more and more prevalent with digital communication channels. I’ve seen a fair amount of it lately as the distanced working seems to have emboldened those who were already prone to use grenades to get their way.

Let’s be real for a moment.  The next few months are going to be filled with a bunch of decisions that are going to be easy to second guess and for us to throw grenades all over the place.  I am reminding myself that I don’t want to be one of those people.  Even when asked, “What do you think is going to happen?”, I am finding myself more cautious of how I respond because the chance that I will be wrong and potentially come across even a day later as tone-deaf is greatly heightened right now.  I’ve been spending time in the Gospels and I’ve come to really appreciate Jesus’ parable teaching methodology as He was able to provide a teaching point that was tough love but always demonstrated how involved He and God wants to be with us. May we be the people who others hear from us His love, grace, mercy, forgiveness and caring for them first-hand.

Reference: Matthew 13:34 (New Living Translation)