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 3K278: Thinking Beyond

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“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field.”

An organization I sit on the Board of has two very big and important initiatives to achieve within the next six months.  To hit their goals they are going to need to try a number of new things and take some risks financially to make happen what needs to happen.  To date, I’ve not seen any of the new ideas or any “thinking beyond” the usual.  This caused me enough concern that I felt I needed to call the leader of the organization.  I made the request of her to ask her team member who is in charge of the area that needs the most attention, this question: “What is that you want to do that you aren’t because you don’t think you will get the support for funding it?”.  The reason I think this is a great question to ask is that by human nature we limit ourselves and back down from dreams and what might on the surface feel unrealistic, leaving us potentially underachieving.  Too many time we start things backwards with what we think we can do instead of declaring what we want to accomplish regardless of what we need to do to get us there!  Maybe it is a mindest that limits us beyond our own self-defined boundaries causing us to hold us back from big things to come.

Think for a moment on how much God is working on us to think beyond our human, daily experience.  He could have set things up for us most differently if He chose to do so, like he did with the Israelites and delivered us manna six days a week and we would have been hand-feeding our earthly existence from the day we were born to the day we die.  But, He didn’t.  Instead he made available everything that is on Earth to us (and now beyond Earth) and shepherds us through to see beyond the time here and into the bigger Kingdom that awaits us.  He wants us to think and act beyond what is given to us now, instead thinking, acting, working and being willing to give everything up so that the Kingdom of God is our next place to be.

Reference: Matthew 13:44 (New Living Translation)