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 1569: Go Ahead Be A Fool!

“Stop deceiving yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world’s standards, you need to become a fool to be truly wise.”

It’s just foolish to start a company that could build a pneumatic tube from Northern to Southern California that could move people at speeds faster than an airplane.  But, if you are the same person who was told he was a  fool to create a company that could mass manufacture accessible and stylish electric cars and to start a company that would privatize space cargo travel and do this at the third of what the government spends, then you might not really be a fool.  Since we know Elon Musk is certainly not a fool, his dreams for the HyperLoop people transportation system seems possible.  If we are not afraid to dream and be called a fool, we can’t predict what we will be able to do.

When we think we have it all together and we know it all, then we need to step back and consider what is really foolish. We are being fools when we think can do it on our own.  What Paul tells us is that we have to reduce ourselves back to being a fool to understand that we don’t have true wisdom and that only God’s wisdom is what we can count upon.  So, let’s not lean on ourselves, but lean on Him and if that feels foolish, then go ahead and be a fool!

Reference: 1 Corinthians 3:18 (New Living Translation)