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 2553: Doubling Back

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“After some time Paul said to Barnabas, “Let’s go back and visit each city where we previously preached the word of the Lord, to see how the new believers are doing.”

We can’t always just go forward and expect that everything behind us, in the past, is going to be fine. If it was that easy, we’d train someone once and then be done and they’d be perfect from that point on.  Ha!  How often does that happen?  Never, if ever!  We have to double back to be sure that where we were is still how we left it and whatever we provided is sticking.  Too often we have people on our teams who don’t want to double back for fear of not seeing the results they expect, or the fear of missing out on what is on front of them.  We don’t want to be looking over our shoulders but there is something to be gained in doubling back, just to be sure.

Paul wanted to double back with Barnabas to be sure that the new believers they’d taught were doing well and that what they had learned was being followed.  With all the new territories and areas that Paul needed to cover, for him to double back was a big commitment and potentially a big sacrifice, so it reminds me that we need to constantly be doubling back to be sure that we haven’t lost ground and that we are still growing, and our areas of focus are sticking. Sometimes, we can’t see where we have come to if we don’t go back and remind ourselves from where we started, fixing what needs to fixed and then moving forward from an even stronger foundation. That’s how we build upon growth.

Reference: Acts 15:36 (New Living Translation)