Warren Rustand and the trouble with a full calendar

A meeting runs past its allotted hour. The person at the head of the table has one more point to make. Around the room, other people’s afternoons begin quietly coming apart. Warren Rustand has a plain objection to this familiar little exercise of power: everyone else has a calendar, too. It is a modest observation from someone who once helped organize the day of the president of the United States.

Rustand’s career contains enough changes of scene to make a conventional business biography slightly dizzy: a Minnesota farm, college basketball in Tucson, a White House fellowship, Gerald Ford’s staff, corporate boardrooms and classrooms full of entrepreneurs. Yet time keeps appearing in the story. Who controls it? What deserves it? How much of a life can disappear while its owner is attending to something described as urgent?

His answer has become the subject of a book and years of teaching. He asks people to make deliberate choices about their lives, including the parts that do not produce a quarterly report. A family, after all, rarely sends an agenda in advance. That does not make it a lesser claim on the day.

The hours belonged to the president

In 1973, Rustand was selected as a White House Fellow. He worked as special assistant to the secretary of commerce before joining Vice President Gerald Ford’s staff. When Ford became president in August 1974, Rustand took on appointments and Cabinet responsibilities. He was in his early thirties, with a job in which the schedule and the decisions of government were inseparable.

The mechanics mattered. Requests for appearances, meetings and telephone calls came through the scheduling office. Proposed schedules went through the White House operations chief, first Donald Rumsfeld and later Richard Cheney, before reaching Ford for approval. A presidential calendar could express priorities as clearly as a speech. It also had to survive the day.

Rustand remembers Ford bringing handwritten pages to the transition, assigning responsibilities and setting out how work would proceed. The memory is revealing: what caught his attention was preparation. Even at a moment with enormous ceremony attached to it, somebody needed to know who was doing what. History has its grand entrances. It also has paperwork.

He left the scheduling office in November 1975. The experience offers an unusually concrete background for his later teaching. Protecting time was already work he had done, under conditions where requests could come from nearly every direction. Years later, he would ask business leaders to exercise similar care over calendars bearing their own names.

Books between the furrows

His first education in possibility took place much farther from Washington. Born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in 1943, Rustand grew up on a farm in the Red River Valley. In his recollection, the pleasures were tangible: animals, open space, work beside his father. The winters were tangible as well. A rural childhood in northern Minnesota comes with rather firm opinions about the weather.

He remembers riding on his father’s lap on a John Deere tractor. As they travelled the rows, his father talked about books and places he had visited. The conversation carried the boy beyond the immediate boundaries of the farm. Rustand later understood those rides as preparation for a different kind of life.

His father had also worked outside farming, selling financial products during the off-season and buying additional land. Entrepreneurship was visible at home before it became a word in Rustand’s professional biography. The family eventually moved to Southern California, where his childhood acquired two new objects of interest: a basketball and a surfboard.

As a teenager, he helped a Fuller Brush salesman fulfill orders, packaging purchases and taking them to customers. The arrangement gave him a view of selling from the delivery end. Someone could make an attractive promise at the door; somebody else still had to arrive with the goods. It is an early business lesson with very little room for decorative language.

A guard with another classroom waiting

At the University of Arizona, Rustand played guard and earned Academic All-American recognition. His career free-throw percentage was .814. He led the team in both field-goal and free-throw percentage for three consecutive years, a distinction in Arizona’s basketball history. Those are records of repeated execution, which is a useful detail in the biography of someone who would later spend so much time talking about habits.

The San Francisco Warriors selected him 30th overall in the 1965 NBA draft. Arizona inducted him into its Sports Hall of Fame in 1978. These achievements belong to an earlier chapter, before leadership seminars and corporate titles became the most visible parts of his public life.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1965 and a master’s in the same subject in 1971. Between those dates he served on Arizona’s faculty. Teaching was therefore present early, alongside sport and business. The later leadership educator did not suddenly materialize after an executive career; there had already been a classroom.

The connections are tempting, though a basketball court is not a boardroom with better shoes. Each setting has its own demands. What the record does show is a person moving between performance, study and instruction, long before his book gave those experiences a common language. He had several places in which to learn what preparation could accomplish.

A meeting ends where it should

After public service, Rustand’s work returned to business. He held chairmanships and executive roles, including chairman and CEO of Cambridge Company and Rural/Metro Corporation, and managing director at SC Capital Partners. His later career included leadership of Providence Service Corporation. Today his public professional profile identifies him with Summit Capital Consulting in Tucson.

The positions provide context for his advice about organizational time. When he explains why meetings should end punctually, he follows the consequences through the room. Each participant has subsequent commitments. Keeping several people for another half hour spreads the disruption across several schedules. An executive may regard that half hour as a minor extension; the organization experiences it in multiples.

There is a courtesy beneath the calculation. A colleague’s afternoon is not an indefinitely expandable resource. Rustand’s explanation treats other people’s commitments as real, even when the most senior person present would prefer to continue. The meeting can be rescheduled if necessary. Its advertised ending ought to mean something.

That gives his leadership teaching a practical edge. The calendar is a place where authority becomes visible without a speech about values. People discover whether their time matters by seeing how it is treated. A punctual finish is a small promise kept, and small promises have the advantage of coming around often enough to be tested.

“One’s success is relevant only when measured against one’s own potential.”

Warren S. Rustand

Thirty-one minutes, deliberately spent

Rustand applies the same attention to the beginning of a day. In one description of his morning practice, he allows a minute to identify his primary purpose, then ten minutes each for gratitude, inspirational reading and journaling. The sequence is simple enough to fit on a scrap of paper. Its simplicity is part of the appeal.

The journal includes lessons and positive experiences. He also considers what it might offer family members later: a record they can inherit and read. That makes the practice more personal than a productivity tally. The writer is preserving something of his thought, including the things a résumé would have no reason to mention.

Others have adopted versions of his ten-minute blocks. Leadership educator Conor Neill describes Rustand as a mentor and writes about reading, journaling and gratitude at the start of the day. The practice travels because its basic materials are available: some time, something worth reading, and a willingness to pay attention.

A morning routine carries no guarantee that the afternoon will cooperate. Its purpose is to create a deliberate beginning before demands accumulate. For a former presidential scheduler, that is a suitably practical form of ambition. You cannot decide every event. You can give the day an opening that belongs to you.

Seven children belong in the plan

Rustand’s conversations about leadership repeatedly return to family. In a 2021 interview, he and his wife Carson were described as parents of seven children and grandparents of nineteen. Numbers like these give “family time” a certain logistical weight. The phrase has to accommodate actual people, rather than remain an agreeable sentiment at the end of a presentation.

In his teaching for entrepreneurs, he discusses creating a family vision statement and making community contribution part of planning for the future. The questions extend beyond the company: what does the family hope to become, and what responsibilities follow from that hope? A business owner accustomed to making plans is being asked to apply some of that attention at home.

His book, The Leader Within Us: Mindset, Principles, and Tools for a Life By Design, appeared in January 2021 with a foreword by Robert M. Gates. Its premise is that deliberate choices and sustained work can bring a person’s life closer to their aspirations. Business remains in the picture, alongside relationships and contribution.

The interesting tension is the executive’s habit of treating work as the part of life that deserves a plan. Rustand brings the other claims into view. Children, partners and communities occupy the same finite week. A calendar filled with professional commitments has already made decisions about them, whether its owner intended those decisions or simply kept accepting invitations.

The next classroom

Rustand’s teaching has found a continuing home in Entrepreneurs’ Organization. He helped establish its Leadership Academy and serves as dean of learning. He also previously chaired the World Presidents Organization. These networks place him among people who already hold authority, but who can still benefit from being asked how they use it.

At an EO Melbourne gathering, he spoke about authentic leadership and the movement toward contribution. The event included an opportunity for prospective members to hear about EO and a dinner for long-standing members afterward. The settings were conversational as well as instructional: a talk, a room of entrepreneurs, then a smaller table.

His public teaching continues. EO Los Angeles has listed an evening with him for November 12, 2026, under the theme of leading and living well. The phrasing fits a career whose public roles have changed while the questions have kept returning. What is the work for? Who benefits? What do the people closest to you receive?

Back at that overlong meeting, the next decision is wonderfully unglamorous. Finish on time. Let people leave. Their afternoon exists beyond your table. Rustand’s larger argument about designing a life can begin with something that small: a space on the calendar, and the decision to respect what belongs there.