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 2675: The Inner Voice

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“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”

I’ve been doing a lot of work with a company that is working on Corporate Culture.  As we were going through some of the findings I asked what was the “inner voice” of the company? I got a lot of strange looks to that question. I had to explain that when it comes to culture, the outside voice is never right.  Companies and people within the company will always tell the better story, sugarcoat problems and leave things with a little better impression of the company than what is real.  But the inner voice, the thoughts that people have of the culture that they don’t express, the cues and signals that aren’t obvious, that is where the real culture resides.  I am convinced that the only way you get to hear the inner voice is that you listen and probe for it.  And to get to that, it demands trust and authenticity that others believe that the person asking is doing it only for one reason, to make the company better.  No guarantees that the full story is told, but that’s the best chance.

How does the Holy Spirit talk to us? It’s a hard one as we are not to trust to our own understandings, but if we are surrendering what is on our minds to Christ, digging into His Word to find what might speak to us, prayerfully seeking God to direct us, then it is probably that God is providing that inner voice as the Holy Spirit.  John Koessler from Moody Bible Institute calls it “intuition” that God may be giving us. Now, when I am in such a position, I check that with others to see if they might hear it differently and then I just have to trust and fall back on the promise of Romans 8:28 that even if I heard it wrong, He doesn’t just leave any of us hanging.

Reference: Romans 8:28 (New Living Translation)