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 788: Big – Small – Big

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May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

Friends of ours just moved to Barcelona. They were in a bookstore in southern Spain and as they walked into the store they saw an architectural book with a picture of their lake house in Canada on the front cover. My first reaction, “What a small world”. And then I thought, “What a big world”. And then I concluded, “What a small world.” How I got to these convoluted conclusions is this. It’s a big world that a picture taken in the hinterlands of Canada ends up on the cover of an architecture book that gets global distribution. It’s a small world that our friends see this book in a bookstore in Spain. But, it begins to be a big world again that I would know about their sighting. If this was ten years ago, I would have never known. But today, I know because of Facebook. Their story showed up in my newsfeed and they made the world big again. And, now you are reading about it as well. The small world just got bigger. This is the world we live in now. Any business that doesn’t recognize and make the most of the big, small, big cycle of social media misses out.

When we were given the Great Commission to go out and spread God’s Word and love, we were to do this in the best way we could. Today, we each can make the big world small and then big again by how we share our faith in all aspects of our lives. Facebook and other social media are not going to go away. Our presences and the lives that we live and who we are is as important online as it is off. Let’s be sure that we are living the same lives online as off and not missing the opportunity to share our faith and who we are there too.

Reference: Psalm 19:14