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 1184: Bye Bye Anonymity, Part 1

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“May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.”

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have a clue who bought and used our products and services.  Think about it for a second; in walks a person to a convenience store.  She buys a single serve diet Pepsi and a bag of Lay’s Baked potato chips.  And then she is gone. PepsiCo has no idea who she is and neither did the 7-11, where she bought both of them.  She had come and gone and both PepsiCo and 7-11 counted her as a positive sale.  All good, right?  Well, maybe not so good because while driving away from the store she opened the diet Pepsi only to find that it was flat and date expired.  She had already opened the chips and started to eat them, which were fine, but she was so upset with the Pepsi being flat that recognizing that Frito-Lay and Pepsi are the same company, she started finding problems with the chips to support her anger.  They were too salty, broken and the bag was not filled, or so she had made up in her mind. A few minutes later when she gets to her house, she takes a picture of both the bottle and the bag (in an unflattering pose) and posts the pictures with some not so kind of words about both of them and about 7-11 as the retailer.  This young woman happens to be a good and creative writer so her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts blow up and within the next 12 hours over a hundred thousand people are piling on with their complaints with the two companies. And to think, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, 7-11 never even knew her.  This is not a farfetched scenario. It happens every day, all day long. If the first time we are going to get to know a customer is through a complaint, the shoe is already on the wrong foot.  Consider that we can get ahead of this type of introduction by finding ways to engage and lose the anonymity by inviting our customers into a relationship earlier and then keeping it alive with positive dialogue.  More tomorrow on this…

Are we not blessed that our God is not one of anonymity or secrets of who He is?  Sure, there are a lot of unexplainable aspects to the Holy Trinity and how Jesus is God and Son at the same time, but those are different mysteries than being able to know and have a personal relationship with Jesus, which we can do. God sent Jesus to the earth to be like us, so we could know Him as both God and man. Man like us.  He gave us His Word so that we can gain more and more knowledge about who He is. And, as we know, He knows us beyond intimately.  He knows each thought, intention and action. There is no anonymity with God.  So, why do we try to act like there is?  We somehow think that He and others don’t see our failings and that we can “get away with it.”  As we do our best to bring glory to God in our purposed worKING, we must consider that nothing we do allows us to be anonymous in the eyes of God.  Let’s today consider and be sure that we are aligning all aspects of who we are so to always be ready to be known for our Lord.

Reference: 2 Peter 1:2 (New Living Translation)