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 3K275: One-Percent At A Time

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“And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth.And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth.”

Imagine we could get so discriminating and differentiating that we could identify each step of a process that we work by into 1% segments.  It would be excruciatingly hard for most work, but the possibilities are out there in a big way if we could.  I like the story of Sir David Brailsford. It goes like this. “He was a coach hired to revitalize British cycling. He did so by committing to what he called “the aggregation of marginal gains,” or a small improvement in a lot of areas. In his words: ‘The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together’.” And, yes, it worked.  Too often we try and tackle too much at once so maybe by breaking things down into a number of smaller improvements we can find results that we weren’t able to find before.

Our Lord has a plan. It’s a big one and one that He is working even when we don’t know He is.  We might say that He is bringing it all together one-percent at a time.  We know that if we can trust that His bigger plan includes each of us, then we can follow along and rest assured that it will be all good. I know it is hard to trust a plan that isn’t clear or hasn’t been broken down and communicated fully to us.  What is so great about God’s plan is that He will make it clearer and clearer to us the more closely we follow Him.  We won’t know a large percentage of the plan until we are with Him in Heaven, but in the meantime, we can move along with His will, one-percent closer at a time.

Reference: Ephesians 1:10 (New Living Translation)