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 2536: Bold Moves – Part 6: Predictive Analysis

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“Commit your actions to the Lord, and your plans will succeed.”

Fast Company Magazine recently ran an article about 10 CEO moves that changed business. We can learn from each of them.

She’d been honing her craft for 20 years before she decided to set up her own business. She didn’t have a business plan, she just knew that if she sold $50 worth of her baked goods in one day that she would be able to repeat that daily and grow from there.  She was being predictive and maybe she was just using one data point, but she was establishing what we would call forecasting and predictive analysis.  By the way, Debbi Fields, sold $75 worth of cookies in the first day and went on to build an empire with Mrs. Fields Cookies.  But more importantly, she laid out a way of thinking that became the way restaurants and other companies that make and sell perishable items run their businesses.  When we have a plan that is granular and actionable and then we stick with it, learning from each day of business, then we can begin to predict what tomorrow might bring.  It won’t always be right, but it’s so much better than guessing.

What can we learn from Debbi Fields?  God teaches us to plan with Him daily (give us this day our daily bread) and commit our actions to the Lord and then our plans will succeed.  What if we were to think of our work (work we do daily to bring glory to Him in how we do it) and we begin to think about the metrics of what we can do and how we can make them predictive?  Let me try an example. What if one of the gifts we have been given is to bring advice and counsel to others?  It is likely that this is a reactive action as in when someone comes to us we give them advice, not we go and give others advice who don’t ask. That’s fine.  But what if we know and can feel God moving through us in those conversations and we know that we are bettering others when we counsel?  How could we be more proactive and increase this activity?  What if we were to set aside an hour a week that we told those on our teams, or others that we work with that will be “open time” that you want to give back to them?  In college these were prescribed to professors – “office hours” (most professors approached them as drudgery).  But what if we had our “open time” and we looked forward to it?  We gave up something else that we used to like to to do, just to be available to others?  Here is what I think we’d find.  We’d find that this becomes the most valuable, productive, enriching, and energizing hour of the week and before long, we’d figure out how to make it 90 minutes or even more frequent.  Proverbs tells us to commit our actions to Him and the plans will succeed.  What actions are we really committing today?

Reference:  Proverbs 16:3 (New Living Translation)