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 3K219: Storytelling

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“Then Jesus said to them, “If you can’t understand the meaning of this parable, how will you understand all the other parables?”

David Riemer, a friend of mine and fellow arts Board Member, wrote a great book this year titled”, “Get Your Startup Story Straight” (plug: It’s a terrific practical book for entrepreneurs and leaders who want to better tell the story of their organizations, etc.).  David tapped into a trend that has emerged over the last 25 years on the importance of storytelling as a way of being an effective communicator and leader.  Makes sense to me as no time in history more so than today do we have available to us so many stories (think TV, podcasts, digital print, etc.).  We live in an amazing age of storytelling. In the current and future, becoming a master story teller could be the difference between being successful or not.

As I wrote yesterday, Jesus spoke in Parables.  Today, we would likely describe it more as “Storytelling”.   And make no mistake, Jesus was a brilliant storyteller as evidenced by thousands of people showing up to hear Him speak and teach and thousands of years later people still pouring over and repeating these stories.  And, these parables that He spoke in, they couldn’t have been easy for people to grasp just from one hearing.  Well, we know this because even the Disciples had to come back and ask for clarifications.  And, I don’t think it was just because of what Jesus said about only those who want to believe will understand, it also had to do with the times.  Remember, there wasn’t anyone capturing the video, adding closed-captions, handing out sermon notes, following up with daily dissections of the message throughout the week.  It was sit, listen, take in what you could remember and go home and talk it out among themselves.  I can imagine a family over dinner going through the Parable of the farmer scattering seed, saying, “Okay, there were three kinds of soil, right…who remembers what the first one was?”.  What this tells me is that this is why we are to spend our time in God’s Word, diligently and repeatedly because we are given His Parables in written form for us to digest daily, like nourishment and seeds that can grow within us.  We might not understand the first time and I don’t think God has that expectation, but we are to do our best to dig in and find the deepest understanding that we can.

Reference: Mark 4:13 (New Living Translation)