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 1001: Inquiring Minds Want To Know

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“Go to the Temple and speak to the LORD for me and for the people and for all Judah. Inquire about the words written in this scroll that has been found.”

I have taken liberty with the pun, “Inquiring minds want to know”. I knew this quote back in the day as the first word being spelled, “Enquiring”.  That is from the tabloid rag, “The Enquirer”.  Regardless, it holds up that those who are inquiring do want to know more.  The new TV ad is out with the blind test between Bing and Google as search engines.  I had to laugh the first time I saw it as someone in the ad agency must have come in and showed the Microsoft marketing team the power of the Pepsi vs. Coke blind taste tests of the 1980’s.  And why not, as that advertising campaign worked then, and it can work now, just in a different age.  What I also find interesting about this ad campaign is that the premise of a better search engine is one that does the better inquiring for us.  For instance, if we wanted to search blue, we can’t just put in the word blue and get what we want. That is because the painter is looking for different shades of blue, the psychology student is looking for how people use the word to describe their mood and the Will Farrell fan wants to see the clips from Old School. So, we have to modify the search.  What technology can do for us to get us the best search results is yet to be seen.  It’s not only about how we inquire, but how the technology knows us. That is where it is all going and in our businesses knowing how someone inquires about our products and services so we can deliver to them what they want in the fastest and fullest way is a competitive advantage.

I am finishing up a biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m actually listening to it as an audiobook and it is fascinating. Bonhoeffer was a true student of the God’s Word and he came up with his ways to study and learn the Bible.  I was most struck by a statement that he said about how his life changed when he stopped reading the Bible and instead began to “Inquire it”. I’d never thought about using the word inquire as a verb when it came to reading the Bible, but that pivot of thinking can be a real life changer if we let it be so.  God’s Word is there to open up Him to us, if we decide to truly get inquisitive.  There is no substitute for what was written and prepared as a direction gift for our lives.  How much we want to inquire defines how much we want to know. Let’s be people who always, when it comes to God’s Word, have inquiring minds that want to know.

Reference: 2 Kings 22:13 (New Living Translation)