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 2253: GIF…Say It Out Loud

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“When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things”

I trust that your (potentially) extra long Fourth of July weekend was great.  While catching up on some reading I came across what seems a pretty silly conversation, but it got me thinking about things we don’t know and still with all of the internet available to us, there still isn’t a right answer.  In this case, it is the pronunciation of the term GIF (graphic interface function).  You know, those mostly silly short video loops that we embed in text messages and emails.  This topic of how to pronounce GIF was even taken up by the The Economist Magazine in this article with a global survey of how we pronounce the term.  What struck me about all of this is that (if you are like me, you don’t  know either), when faced with having to say GIF out loud you might to do like me and say, “GIF as in Gift of Jif as in Jiffy…whatever it is, you know what I mean.”  Basically, I have been embarrassingly punting knowing the right way to say it ever since I first saw the term.  And, I would go out on the limb to guess that we all have other things in our work and lives that we do the same.  We don’t really know, but we don’t want to look foolish and ask, so we have been faking it for a long time.  This is fine, until one day we are expected to know and then we don’t.

Paul challenges us in this area with how we conduct ourselves and what is important to us.  As he describes what is considered childish, he is also saying to us that if we are going to say that we believe then we ought to know what it is that we believe and take the time and effort to study God’s Word to become better at understanding what it is that God is saying to us.  Spoiler alert:  We have limited time in the bodies that God has given us, so each day can be thought of as a GIFt received or a GIFt wasted.  Let’s not let our lives play out as the silly GIF loop that has us stuck and not moving forward. That much, we can know.

Reference:  1 Corinthians 13:11 (New Living Translation)