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 3K305: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

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“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”

Decisions are hard.  We know that by now.  Decisions are also used as preliminary marketing, especially in the public arena with things like professional sports player drafts and political campaign announcements. I guess the idea is that we are taken in with the possible decisions that might be made so we can discuss, debate, agree or disagree, all of which creates more attention.  However, for most of us the decisions we make don’t gather a lot of hype.  We just go about our decision-making and then see how others respond and then we react from there. But, how best to make decisions?  There are many ways.  The Pro-Con list is a favorite.  There is ranking and scoring different attributes to a decision and then averaging out a score, there is polling of other people’s points of view and trying to find a consensus, there is majority wins voting and there is always, if everything else fails, the coin flip. I’m sure I’ve left out others (like what does Chat-GPT think I should do).  The bottom line is that each day is filled with decision–making and it’s important that we have a decision-making approach and model that we utilize to a degree of proven success that gives us confidence as we move forward.  Even better is when an organization has a model that is consistently used so that when tough decisions are made we can all get to how and why with a level of understanding and trust.

As believers, we are off-base if we don’t bring forward what we are hearing from God before we make any decision, big or small.  An Faith-Driven entrepreneur I know made a throw-away comment about how the next decision he makes on where to take his business he won’t make it without getting God’s direction first.  He learned and it sounded like he learned the hard way.  I love the little line I heard from Ted Lasso, “Sometimes you have to be willing to take a walk with Robert Frost and know that things could go either way.”  I’d rephrase that to our way of being, “Every time we should take a walk with God to know which we He wants to take us”.

Reference:  Proverbs 3:5-6 (New Living Translation)