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 3K314: Taking Or Giving

“Give freely without begrudging it, and the Lord your God will bless you in everything you do.”

We are likely to hear these kinds of statements throughout the business year: “We’ve got to take back market share”, “We’ve taken in XXX millions in profit this year.”, “We’ve taken control of their business.” The operative word is “taken” or “take”. Business is built around taking in more and more until ultimately we have “taken over”. So, it would not be that unusual for a day to be filled with activities that are about also taking. We can only hope that this taking is from the competition and not from each other, but that would be naive to think. Yes, we also take from one another all day long. We take people’s time and talents. We also take their ideas and put them to work. Not all taking is bad, but it is important that we balance this with giving. Giving is a word that is less used in the office unless we are are trying to make a point like, “Let me give you some advice”, which we hope that they will take.

Imagine that we were to split our time today just evenly between taking and giving and how much better our workplaces would be? The real question is how much giving will we do today? Do we have certain activities and times where we can shift the emphasis and see if others around us can see us trying to give to them, versus taking from them? At the end of today count what percentage of your day was about giving. God tells us to give and give not begrudgingly and if we do we will be blessed. That in itself is a gift worth taking.

Reference: Deuteronomy 15:10