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 830: 800 Million

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“And the Good News about the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, so that all nations will hear it; and then the end will come.”

In a few weeks Facebook will become a publicly traded company. When they do so they will being used by over 800 million people. There is no other social network that has gotten this many users. Are there any other companies who have this many customers? It’s amazing that they have been able to amass this many users in less than 10 years of business. At 800 million people they are close to reaching 1/7th of the world’s population. As they go on their road show with investors, you can imagine that their growth story has them reaching a much higher percentage of the population than where they are now. How big can Facebook be? I think as big as people are looking to be connected with each other to share experiences. A friend, and well-known technology thinker and I were having coffee last week and we were discussing the legitimacy of the communication of the online world versus the spoken word, we landed on, while different and maybe more superficial, it is a now important form of communication and relating that is not likely to go away any time soon.

At my church in San Francisco, http://cornerstone-sf.org , we recently updated our website to better position our church in our community and tell our unique story. This is an important activity for a church. I know so, because this past weekend while we were in Tahoe I wanted to go to church and the way I found the church that I ended up attending was by searching on the internet and browsing through the different websites until I found the one that “felt” most like the one that I wanted to attend. As I walked into the church (a high school auditorium) on Sunday, I already had a sense and feel for what the church would be like. While not perfect, it did live up to what they marketed online. In Matthew Jesus talks about when we will see His Kingdom come, letting us know that this will happen when everyone on the earth has been given His message. Before the internet, before Facebook, that seemed so far off and dependent upon missionaries carrying the Word to the farthest flung parts of the world. But what if Facebook hits two, three, four, or almost seven billion people. Could it be one of our messages that post or we forward to a friend that ends up being the one? Let’s let that thought sink in and consider how important our words can be.

Reference: Matthew 24:14 (New Living Testament)