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 915: Breakage

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“… He will neither fail you nor abandon you.”
In business there is a term; “breakage”.  In most businesses breakage is a bad thing.  It means that what was supposed to have been in the business ends up disappearing.  In retail the product that comes in the back door never makes it past the cash register, but instead ends up walking out the door being unaccounted.  In other businesses, breakage is counted on to making the business model work.  Subscription models are built this way. Health clubs are a prime example. If all of their members showed up everyday they wouldn’t have nearly enough room to accommodate everyone.  They probably couldn’t handle it if even half showed up.  The same breakage works for any digital subscription service.  Spotify, Rhapsody, etc. all count on more subscribers as they couldn’t afford all of the royalties if everyone was using the service to their maximum.  Insurance companies are built on the principle of breakage.  It’s all good until lots of claims come in. Yep, breakage…it’s like fire.  As a new friend said to me, “Fire can either burn down the house or warm it up”.  We each need to look at the breakage points in our businesses to see which is the advantage and which is a danger.
We don’t have breakage in our faith.  God doesn’t ever fail us nor does He leave us without His saving grace.  While it may be that we feel like there is breakage all around us and that we can’t hold onto what we have or can’t take advantage of what we have been given, that is not the feeling that God wants us to be filled.Instead, He challenges us to find the positives and to make something extraordinary of problems or things that are being taken away.  A thought for us today would be what is the breakage that we are experiencing in our lives and in our work and how are we using both what we are given, and what we are losing, so that we always bring glory to Him through what we do each day. Let’s take the concept of breakage seriously to make our lives the examples that can move the Kingdom forward.
Reference: Deuteronomy 31:6 (New Living Translation)