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 1130: Growth Hackers

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 “Rather, you must grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. All glory to him, both now and forever! Amen.”

In the early days of technology offerings from a business to a consumer, investors didn’t want to see money spent on marketing. Instead they wanted the engineering of the product to be responsible for spreading the word and making the product popular. So software engineers came up with clever ideas on how to connect and create cohorts and community.  Over time these morphed into terms like, “Friend” and “Follow”.  And with sophistication and a little slight of keyboarding, services and products would grow almost magically. In today’s age it’s a little harder as lots of people have peaked behind the curtain and learned the early secrets, but every day someone unlocks some way to build on the current to make growth happen.  Today, these people like to call themselves, “Growth Hackers”.  We will see how long the term exists and who really gets to keep the title legitimately but one thing is for sure; if you have a real growth hacker on your team, you can make magic happen!

God was the first growth hacker, not surprisingly really.  When He created us He gave us the instinctual desire to procreate and create our own interpretations of life and the things we need to better our lives.  The movie “The Matrix” had us all as just part of an algorithm, each one of us factoring into the program running, or not. It’s not exactly that way. God wants us to be vehicles of growth in the world that He created for us.  He wants us to expand our minds, test our bodies and make the most of all that we are.  But more importantly, He wants us to be “Growth Hackers” for His Kingdom. If we are not expanding His Kingdom, we won’t see growth in our own lives and because He has left this growth up to us, the Kingdom of God could be limited if we don’t do as we are called. When you think about the impact you are having in the office or in life, can you say that you are growth hacking for Christ?
Reference:  2 Peter 3:18 (New Living Translation)