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 2587: Percentage Of What?

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“Then Jesus said, “I chose the twelve of you, but one is a devil.”

I read some statistics in Business Week that the percentage of the U.S. Federal Government spending on salaries of federal workers fell to 6.4% of GDP in the third quarter of 2018.  That was below the average that was 10.1% in the 80’s and 14.8% in the 50’s.  On the surface that looks like greater productivity and a good thing.  But, when you get under the numbers the spending has nearly doubled since 1984, and the lower percentages is because the GDP has grown so significantly in the same period.  Is that good news, or bad?  Well, it’s all in how you want to interpret what is too large of a percentage of what?  We run into this problem all the time with growth in our businesses. Spending as an absolute is up, but as a percentage of sales or growth it is flat or down.  How we see the glass is always situational but the most important thing we can do is to be sure we zoom out, take the long view from the past to where we are now in order to contextualize whatever it is that we are doing as a percentage of what we have still in front of us.

This past weekend, Luis Menjivar, an Associate Pastor at our church reminded us in his message that Jesus never played the percentage game.  Like He did with His disciples, He accepted them all, even when He knew that 8.33% of the team was going to betray Him and hatch the plot that would bring Him to His earthly death.  Just as God doesn’t turn His back on us as He measure what percentage of people follow Him, He also accepts that as much as we may want to give all that we have to Him, we will always come up short. It’s been said that God grieves for those who are His creations who decide to not follow Him.  As it would any parent, to have our children turn their back on what is right, there would be that pain.  But, our God is pure love and instead of punishing us for not giving 100% to Him all the time, He loves us for what we are trying to give and always wants to be there 100% for us!  That is a wonderful percentage!

Reference John 6:70 (New Living Translation)