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 980: Backing Up

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“With all these things in mind, dear bothers and sisters, stand firm and keep a strong grip on everything we taught you both in person and by letter.”

Yesterday I wrote of the recent hard drive crash I experienced on my computer on Friday afternoon September 14th.  I detail the date here because it is important to know that as I write this over a week plus has passed and the best of the best in hard drive recovery have been working on it in a clean room and still have yet to recover any of the information.  Unless one has had a hard drive crash, without being fully backed up, you don’t realize the severity and the crippling effect that this can have on one’s productivity and psyche. How dependent we become on the shortcuts and ease that technology has provided for us!  For instance, we have now long gotten used to the auto-populate to line feature in emails.  Someone sends us an email, we respond and from that point on their email address will pop up, like magic in the “To” line and we just keep going, not ever thinking that that shortcut causes us to not add them into our contact list where it can be backed up and saved.  When the hard drive crashes, all of those magically appearing email addresses are gone for good.  Businesses build in redundancy to their systems and while the cloud looks like its’ own magic it is still the business of servers talking to servers to ensure that no data is ever lost. We would be better off if we always have a mindset of being “backed up” and not susceptible to the viruses and failures that can come.  We can stretch the metaphor further and also want to ensure that we are always backed up in our jobs with the next person/talent who can be ready behind us if we physically or emotionally have a failure.  These are the costs of doing business and being backed up is critical to a long term success.

God is always calling us to be backed up in Him.  His Word sits in front of us at all times and He calls us into it to give us a foundation and steadfast hold on His direction for our lives.  But, like my recent failure to back up my computer, we can get lazy and sloppy in our spiritual lives too and find that we have missed days, weeks or months without spending time in God’s Word and backing ourselves up to Him.  Today, let’s be sure we have a back up routine in place so that when the crashes come, we are never too far out of synch with where we should be.

Reference: 2 Thessalonians 2:15 (New Living Translation)