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 1988: New Words and Ways

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“…And yet, we hear them speaking in our own native languages!”

A number of the companies I am involved with are technology companies that build their applications and services to speak to larger platforms.  They do this through Application Program Interfaces, or what are known as APIs.  Because the platforms are constantly changing, the APIs must always be updated and it can feel like the application builders are always having to chase the changes just to keep speaking the same language or not fall out of date.  I sometimes feel this way too when the language of business and culture changes and I have no idea what someone is talking about, until I go find out.  And, the last part of that is what is important.  We must go find out. The languages will never stop changing and evolving but if we want our companies, our employees and ourselves to stay relevant, we must stay in tune with what changes we see happening and also try to anticipate what might be coming.  If we miss a “release” or a new “build” we could miss enough that it becomes really, really hard to catch back up.

The languages of how we communicate the Gospel are also changing quickly.  Roll back not that many years ago and if someone had said, “Just about everyone you know will be on a thing called Facebook”, well, after you looked at them funny you probably would have shrugged and just moved on because you’d had no idea what a face book was.  And today, Facebook is becoming a thing of the past to a new generation and they are off to something else.  Paul describes how the Holy Spirit created a way for everyone to understand each others’ native languages so that everyone could hear and understand the message of Jesus.  The same Holy Spirit can help us navigate new languages, new words and new ways of communicating so we can be attuned to how best to today, spread the Good News.

Reference:  Acts 2:8 (New Living Translation)