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 2076: Rock and Roll Matters

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I am interrupting the part 5 series of Stages of Adoption given the events over the weekend. That series will resume tomorrow with Part 4. Until then…

Patti and I were in a lighting store in The Bowery district of Manhattan last Thursday when the clerk sitting next to the table we were browsing cried out aloud, “Oh no, Prince died!”.  We all stopped what we were doing and our phones began to send alerts from CNN and other sources that Prince had been found dead at his home, Paisley Park in Minneapolis.  I had to collect myself for a second. Prince was 57 and he’d just been in the Bay Area and in other cities playing small venues to work on new material.  The news seemed all wrong. And then, we get the confirmation that he has died and the country turned purple for the weekend.  Movie theaters across the country will begin screening Prince’s movie, Purple Rain and there will be one tribute after another in the coming weeks. Why is it that those musicians who die young shock us in a way that makes us reach to our memories and place each of their songs into a place and time, that takes us back to the first moment we heard “that” song.  And in the few short months that have passed in 2016, we have lost David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince and many others who wrote and recorded the soundtracks of our lives. And so it will be for as long as we live. It might be that once the global stars who sold tens of millions of albums before the internet and Napster will be the end of the line of the stars who stop the world for a moment in time, that this phenomena will pass, but for now, when we lose those who established themselves as a thread in the fabric of our culture, we will stop for a moment and talk about how music makers, and rock and roll matters.

Can we find Jesus in the events of today?  Yes, if we are open to listening and recognizing that God makes Himself relevant each and every day.  I didn’t know Prince but was in the same room with him on a couple of occasions, but I never got to meet him personally, however God used Prince yesterday in NYC at Hillsong Church to remind me that He is in everything.  For as I sat there thinking about how music and rock and roll matters, I was reminded that our faith is built upon a rock that was rolled away from a tomb.  Without that rock being rolled away our faith would have died on the cross, but that is not what happened.  The rock rolled away and He was risen and so He lives today.  God created our world.  He is the God of all creation and therefore He can be found everywhere we look.  Of course there is sin and not all is aligned with Him, but if we are attuned and focused on Jesus we will find Him wherever we are. Just like I heard Him yesterday in the death of Prince.