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 2356: Where To Coach

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“Instruct the wise, and they will be even wiser. Teach the righteous, and they will learn even more.”

I’m not exactly sure why, but in the corporate world we love to try to make people into something beyond what they already are.  The graveyards of the business world are filled with employees who were coached and “developed” to acquire new skills, to manage and lead, to change functional areas, etc. only to learn that they “couldn’t” and then they leave their company, for someplace else many times to return to what they did before successfully.  Maybe we do need to look to athletics every now and then to learn a lesson. What professional baseball team would spend a moment trying to coach and teach a Pitcher to become a Catcher?  None!  In fact, most (unless they are in the National League) don’t want their Pitchers even wasting time on how to become a better Batter.  Yet, here we are, probably today thinking about, planning, or already working with someone to make them into something they aren’t because we want to “expand” and “grow” them. It is possible that we don’t need to do that, but instead what we need to do is change our structures and systems to allow that person to get better and better at what they do best, and make sure that they can be financially rewarded as such.  Not everyone needs to be a Manager and not everyone needs to be doing something different in order to feel more recognized and rewarded.

The Proverbs tell us almost the same in that it appears that the greatest return on our investment is to continue to work with the wise and righteous to make them (and us who strive to be both) even more so. God is also telling us today where to spend the time and effort in our own lives. In order for us tor grow wiser, we must be instructed and coached and to find even more of God in our lives we must be open to learn. It’s a fair question that we are posed with…are we open today to learning by being instructed and coached?

Reference: Proverbs 9:9 (New Living Translation)