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 2252: Seeing And Believing

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“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.”

Was it really almost 20 years ago that I got a call from the EA Studio General Manager that produced Madden Football who told me I needed to check out this new book about a child wizard and that this could be the next big piece of fiction to make a videogame from its story?  I remember going out the next Saturday afternoon to the Borders bookstore (now gone) on University Avenue in Palo Alto  and asking if they had the book. The counter clerk didn’t know and had to look it up in her computer.  She said, “We do have one copy in the Children’s Section upstairs.”  I walked up the steps and after searching for a few minutes I found the book.  It was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”.  I briefly scanned the jacket and the first chapter and then put it back on the shelf and walked away.  You see, I couldn’t see it.  I mean, I could see that we could make a videogame from anything but for us to imagine what the characters looked like from a piece of early fiction and to create a game from a story that no one knew, or knowing would anyone would really care about going forward, was too hard for me to see.  A couple of years later we paid a whole lot of money to gain the rights to create the Harry Potter videogame series, which became a billion-dollar plus game franchise for us.  I could see it then because I could see what Harry, Hermione and Ron looked like from the movie casting. I could also then see the ongoing story arc of good vs. evil and how engaging the story would be for kids and adults alike. I could see it because, well, everyone could see it by then.

I tell this story because we have just celebrated 20 years of J.K. Rowling’s story and a generation learned to read and imagine from her seven book series and still today she brings us follow-up books, plays and movies.  And, I tell this story as a reminder that sometimes we need to look longer and harder than scanning a book cover flap and reading the first chapter to be able to see what it is that could be created.  We live in a world of “see it now and see it fast” or we can’t see it at all.  But to really see, sometimes we have to step out and take a risk to believe it before we fully can see it.

What is faith?  It is believing in those things we yet cannot see.  It is what God challenges us to do.  We had that challenge everyday this week and we will have it again this weekend and next work week. But, the promise given is in the challenge itself.  Why would God, who could show us everything fully any time He chooses, instead ask us to believe in what we can’t see?  I believe it is because what is on the other side of that faith is something so remarkable and wonderful that if we saw it now, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.  And that is us today, like me with that one single copy of the book that no one in the bookstore even knew if they had or not.  I had no idea what to do with it, until I finally could see. God isn’t going to reveal it all to us yet, but He will and until then we are to believe what it is that we can’t yet see.  And like my Harry Potter story ended, it will be well worth it and we will only wish we’d believed earlier!

Reference:  Hebrews 11:1 (New Living Translation)