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 893: Facing Up, Part 4

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“I tell you the truth, when you were young; you were able to do as you liked”

Today is the day.  Facebook goes public and we will see if they can garner the $104B market valuation they desire, making it the largest single initial public offering in history.  Where I live here in Silicon Valley there has been a palpable buzz all week. And today is the day.  Today, Facebook grows up.  Today, for the first time in the company’s history the focus of employees won’t be on the product or the number of users but instead in the number behind the stock symbol, “FB”.  From this point on the price of the stock will become an interest for all and an obsession for most inside the company. Back in the late ’80’s I was a part of PepsiCo becoming the first Fortune 500 company to provide stock options to all employees.  All 450,000 employees, other than those in countries where stock options were illegal, received “Share Power Grants”.  The idea was to align the entire company from CEO to Hourly employees with a common measure.  It was exciting and it lasted for many years.  And then over time the stock price stopped increasing, the small number of shares that someone received were not meaningful any longer, employees started to realize that the company and themselves could be performing extraordinarily and because of macroeconomic forces the stock price would stay down, and employees lost hope and faith in the program. It will be awhile before that happens to Facebook employees but all of the ramifications of having a public measure that matters to an employees checkbook is a growing up pain that Facebook is now certain to experience.


Where we establish our measures and fix our eyes for a prize is important as we grow up spiritually. When we were young in spirit, we may not have been able to let go of many of the parts of the of the world that we think establish our identity and self-esteem.  But, if we are growing and facing up to this maturation process, then we will get better and better at discerning those things that are in God’s will and are moving the Kingdom forward, and those that aren’t. We are bombarded with the messages to care about the opposite. Let’s today, as we take measure, be sure that we are fixed on and staying consistent on the things of the Kingdom and the disciplines that He has given us to exercise.


Reference: John 21:18 (New Living Testament)