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 2364: Two Heads….Yes, Are Better Than One!

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“Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success.”

I was listening to a radio interview about the process of evaluating College Admission applications.  On the phone was the Head of Admissions at Bucknell University.  She was talking about how Bucknell has now moved to two-people evaluating an application and coming to a joint recommendation/decision versus just one person.  She gave a number of efficiency and productivity reasons (I didn’t know what the average application only receives a few minutes of evaluation – which sounds really lopsided in effort given the hours that a student, their references  and their parents toil over an application).  She then went on to say that she also felt that with two people, a better decision is being made.  Well, that didn’t sound mind-blowing to me but she said that this approach was “revolutionary” for higher education.  I don’t like to be cynical in this blog, but I must say that this caught me by surprise.  I guess I never figured that in this day and age of optical character recognition, machine learning, predictive analysis…and even artificial intelligence that we hadn’t moved past one person sitting in their living room at night with a mug of coffee reading applications and then solely making the decision.  Now, if this doesn’t make you want to stop reading here and go ask, “What are we doing around here that just doesn’t make sense?”, then nothing will. One timeless lesson, no matter how long it takes us to get to it; two heads always remain better than one.

We are taught to always bring in others for advice and counsel before we make decisions.  I did this recently when I had two people meet two members of my accountability group (all four of them together) to talk about an opportunity that was put in front of me.  I wanted all four of them to feel good and right about it and then provide me the advice before I made the decision.  It may be unique that as Believers this is part of how we are instructed to live our lives, but let’s take advantage of that direction and call upon others so that we are making better and better decisions and not trusting only on our own thinking.

Reference: Proverbs 15:22 (New Living Translation)