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 2800: The Wilderness

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“The Spirit then compelled Jesus to go into the wilderness…”

On Friday last week I wrote of the 40 years in the desert that Moses, Aaron and the Israelites endured. That’s a long time, but so is any amount of time that we are forced to go into any place, state of inactivity or activity that is restrictive or limiting to what we want to do or when we want to do it.  Let’s think hard about this feeling when we next make an assignment to someone who might cause them to give up family or personal time to meet a deadline.  Surely, we wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves, but we don’t always take the time or expend enough energy to understand what the full consequences are of the deadline given.  It’s something for to think more deeply about going forward.

Jesus went into the wilderness because “the spirit then compelled” him to do so. The definition of compelled is this: “force or oblige (someone) to do something.”  So, the idea of the wilderness for 40 days without food, water or company I imagine wasn’t His idea of a get-away vacation or anything He wanted to do that time.  But, He did it and at the end of the day, He was still the Son of God and could have resisted, refused or negotiated His way out of it, but like He didn’t so when on the cross, He didn’t fight back, He just followed the Will of God and went into seclusion. It might be that we are to now appreciate this time for Him more than we could have before.  Let’s remember that while we may not like it, the wilderness is also in God’s Will.

Reference:  Mark 1:12 (New Living Translation)