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 2567: Reset

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“Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.”

it’s early into the calendar/fiscal year and the expectation is that we have already written down our annual goals and resolutions and are working towards them with all that we can muster.  Bad news.  Only less than 20% of people actually set goals that they write down.  Good news.  Nearly 80% of the people who write down their goals achieve them.  So, there is no reason whatsoever to not have written goals to direct our time, energy and resources.  If we don’t know what we want to achieve, we achieve nothing.  I’d hope that we have a boss who is asking us for our goals and objectives to keep the organization on track, but that’s no guarantee so we just need to do it ourselves, now, and stick with them day by day, week by week, month by month, until the year is through. To not do so is to waste what we could be accomplishing.  Let’s reset this today.

I have found that I (and many with whom I speak and know) get bogged down with the goals that we should set for ourselves in our personal and spiritual lives because we get overwhelmed with so much that God tells us is important and where we should focus to become closer to Him and to practice our faith in our deeds. When in doubt, when can always fall back on the great commandments; Love God and Love Others.  That always works, but we may be looking to be more intentional. I was struck by a simple verse in Isaiah that caused me to pause and reevaluate my own goals.  A good reset for all of us could start with, “Learn to do good”.  We could build a year’s worth of goals around what, through God, could we learn, so that we could do good for others because of Him? That’s a reset I am pursuing!

Reference: Isaiah 1:17 (New Living Translation)