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 2742: Problem Discernment

“With a prayer to the God of heaven, I replied…”

Is there anything more hard to discern at work than the best use of our time to solve problems? I read this the other day and loved it.  It’s from President Eisenhower: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That just about says it all, huh? There is no easy answer but the type of discernment we need will best be found if we can place problems within a strategic framework of vision, goals and objectives.  Without that type of grounding and touchstones, then we could find ourselves trying to solve the urgent before the important or worse everything all at once and ultimately end up not solving anything at all.

Where do we take our problems to discern what to do, when and what to tackle first?  If we are committed to returning to a place where that touchstone is solid, reliable and knows us the best, then we will bring all of our problems, big and small to the Lord before we attempt to move forward.  Nehemiah knew this and called upon the Lord before he moved.  We can do the same today.

Reference: Nehemiah 2:4 (New Living Translation)