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 3K286: Keeping The Charge

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“For God is working in you, giving you the desire and power to do what pleases Him.”

Every business today ensures they have backup energy sources in case power is lost. Threats of natural disasters, terrorism, etc. have made this a requirement. Public companies have “disaster recovery” systems in place as part of the financial security of the company for their shareholders. Any company that depends on their servers for internet traffic will now “co-locate” their servers to another location or into the “cloud” where they are more assured that they will not lose power. Even with AWS or other “cloud” services we have to have power to get to them. Can you imagine if Google was to lose power for a full day? What would the world do? (I’m sure we would be okay, but you get the point). Even at home now we buy Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS) and connect them between the wall socket and our computers, printers, chargers, alarm systems, etc. so that we can ensure that we are protected. In areas where natural power outages are common from snow, ice, wind, etc. the gas generator has become a household staple. So much emphasis on uninterrupted power and yet, I think about ourselves personally and look at how we let our batteries and our own energy deplete to the point of exhaustion and we don’t do much to ensure our own personal UPS. Work and stress can be the most draining personal power suckers imaginable. A hard day at work and we can come home and fall over the threshold stumbling to the sofa or a couch. We do this enough days or weeks in a row and we run the risk of total exhaustion and burnout. Not a pretty picture is it? But not an unfamiliar picture either?

God does not want us to live this way. He wants us to live and work with the power of God within us so that we can face the stress, the challenges, the obstacles so energized and positive that others would see and say that only God must be in that person. If we doubt that this is true read no further than in Philippians 2:3. God is saying to us that if we will allow it, He has filled us already with not only the desire but also the power to do those things that please Him and bring Him glory. By itself, those are power giving words. We learn each day here what those things are that we can do at work to bring Him glory and pleasure. If we continue to focus our efforts there and filter and pull our work through those standards, then we can be assured that He is our UPS and that we never need worry about a total blackout in our lives. We have inside of us the power of the One who created all energy and power. Wow, if that does not charge us up today, what will?

Reference: Philippians 2:3 (New Living Translation)