Man With a (Talent) Plan

By: Anna MuoioWed Dec 19, 2007 at 12:24 AM

Electronic Arts makes some of the world's most popular computer games. It's Rusty Rueff's job to fill the company with some of the world's best gamers and software programmers.

He's an All-Star Player

Rusty Rueff has a voice that you want to listen to. It's the kind of voice that could, it seems, talk anyone into anything. It's also a voice that explains why, as a kid growing up in Jeffersonville, Indiana, Rueff wanted to be a disc jockey. By the time he was 18, he was the voice for WORX, a small commercial station in Madison, Indiana. Over the years, Rueff worked for WASK, WNDE, WNAP, and then WFBQ -- he still rattles off the call letters in perfect syncopation.

But one day, Rueff was greeted by a new program director and by the shock that everyone but he and another person at the station had been fired. "I immediately wondered why I hadn't been fired," says Rueff. "And I remember the program director telling me, 'It's simple. I like your voice.' " Then Rueff remembered something that his father, a TV news anchor and radio disc jockey in Louisville, Kentucky, had told him. "My dad told me that at some point in my career, I would get to a place where I'd realize that the organization viewed me as a disposable asset, and that I would have to decide if I wanted to be a part of that organization anymore."

Soon after, Rueff jumped into his Volkswagen Beetle, drove 52 miles to Lafayette, Indiana, and, at age 22, had a "What am I going to do with the rest of my life" talk with one of his mentors, who was then the dean of Purdue University, where Rueff had attended college. The dean told Rueff that he'd flourish in Purdue's counseling program. "Then she walked me over to admissions, waived the admissions tests, and I entered graduate school that day."

A few years later, Rueff found himself in Binghamton, New York. It was the first day of the rest of his professional life. He was the HR manager for a Frito-Lay plant. The factory -- a hotbed for union activity -- had 450 manufacturing employees, more than 100 distribution workers, and 20 frontline managers. The plant was in turmoil. Rueff's job, his boss explained to him, was twofold. First, Rueff needed to make the drivers happy and keep them union-free. Second, he had to reduce the embarrassingly high turnover rate (up to 50% per year) among frontline managers.

Rueff's response? Forget feedback forms and off-sites. He turned his house into a hangout for the 20 young managers. They became a tight-knit group in no time. "We would do everything together," says Rueff. "It's the only way we knew how to survive." That year, the turnover rate among managers at the Binghamton plant was zero -- and the drivers never joined the union.

Rueff remained at PepsiCo for 10 more years, honing his skills in various positions at Frito-Lay, at Pizza Hut, and finally, in 1997, at the parent company -- as vice president of international HR. It was only in that position that he began to reckon explicitly with the importance of creating a community of talent. "We were looking for people with great international experience -- which is one talent pool that always seems too small. But we had no way of tracking who we had seen around the world, who was good, or who we'd contacted in the past," says Rueff. "Basically, we had no clue."

So Rueff and his team set out to identify the 25 best general managers in Asia, Europe, India, and Latin America -- whether or not they'd ever worked for PepsiCo -- and then tried to strike up relationships with them. He used recruiters to source and prequalify some of those people, but he insisted that the first contact be made either by him or by someone from his team. He believed that the job of selling his company should never be left in the hands of a headhunter. "I would tell people that all we wanted to do was have a cup of coffee with them," says Rueff. "We knew they were good. We just wanted to tell them the things that we were doing at Pepsi. I knew that anyone would take that call. I'm a busy guy too. But if I get a call from a business leader in another industry who says, 'For nothing else, let's just get to know each other,' I'm going to take that call. Who wouldn't? It's built-in networking; it's the stuff that makes the world go around. And it works every time."

Rueff's networking initiative improved the global talent pool available to Pepsi -- and led directly to some high-profile hires. For example, it's how he found the man who became the president of Pepsi in China. Rueff asked Pepsi's CEO of HR for Asia to meet with the man. The Pepsi executive had already heard of him and thought he was outstanding. At that point, Rueff, acting like a true matchmaker, alerted Roger Enrico, the CEO of PepsiCo, to the potential hire. Rueff stressed that the next time Enrico was in China, he should meet with this man, even though Pepsi didn't have a specific job to fill. After their meeting -- a one-hour breakfast that turned into an extended conversation -- Enrico told Rueff that Pepsi needed to hire this guy. "I told Enrico that we didn't have a job open. He told me that we'd just have to make one. So we created the president of China position," says Rueff. "The point is to maintain relationships with people so even if the time's not right, when someone finally is motivated to make a change, we're just a phone call away."