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 745 and day 746: Steve Jobs

purposed worKING 1 Comment

I am leaving this post up for a second day due to the high amount of interest and number of people who were passing it along to others….Have a great weekend.

“And this world is fading away, along with everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever”

I was fortunate enough to know Steve Jobs and interact with him a few times over the past decades. Those interactions were seldom, but each time impacting. Most intensely was the time I had the chance to go to work directly for him at Apple, which I declined (not an easy thing to do with Steve Jobs), and still he was gracious enough to years later allow me to bounce ideas off of him and take time out of his schedule to consider business proposals and concepts.

In his personal conference room, two years before the ipod was released he tried to get me to guess what the next big thing would be that “we could all keep in our pockets, but wasn’t a phone and didn’t take pictures”. Of course, I didn’t come up with a $400 MP3 player that every teenager in America would have to have. As I fumbled around, he sat there with the smirk that only Steve Jobs could put on that was both respectfully condescending and childlike mischievous. He told me that “it would change the world”. He was right.

No, the ipod, nor the iphone, nor the ipad, stopped world hunger or brought about world peace, but in their way they each have contributed to those. They couldn’t cure cancer. Nothing can, so far, and Steve knew that too. But, somewhere this morning there is a doctor working on that cure who is storing his/her research on their ipad and sharing data with another researcher across their iphones. And there is a surgeon staring down at a tumor to be removed with the music from their ipod making them a little steadier and more confident. And there is a troubled youth who doesn’t have friends or a family structure who exists and finds themselves in music as they put those iconic white earbuds in and walks through a dangerous neighborhood to school. And there is a working Mother this morning, without childcare, who is trying to figure out how to balance the day, who for a few minutes can find some peace and quiet by asking her kids to sit down and watch Toy Story, or Finding Nemo, or Cars on the DVD.

Yes, Steve Jobs did change the world, in his own way.

He made business cool for people who didn’t know that they could be a geek and also run a company. Before Apple (and Microsoft), geeks were relegated to the backroom and didn’t see much less step into a boardroom. Steve (and Bill) changed that. Steve showed us that design and elegance were as important to a product as what it did. Every industry was forced to follow once we got our first interaction with a Steve Jobs Apple product. Steve brought good, wholesome, and mass-market entertainment to all of us with the great movies from Pixar and from that success came others who followed to put digitally animated full feature films, rated G or PG-13 perennially at the top of the box office lists. Steve changed the way we think about great retail experience. He took retail workers and turned them into “geniuses”. The reason that there are now 5-10 people waiting for us to help us personally in the Verizon, ATT or Sprint stores is because of the Apple store model. Before Apple retail, the best we could expect was a Radio Shack.

Today, the world is without our generation’s Walt Disney, our Thomas Edison, and our Beethoven. Steve Jobs will be missed and generations will remember what he did and who he was. I had no reason to call him or correspond with him anytime in the near future, but I miss this morning, that I could have and knowing that, as he was before, a person who would listen, take the time, and be bluntly honest, all because he cared.

Steve’s passing is a reminder to all of us that we are just travelers through our own time with a shared worldly end in sight. But, as believers and followers of Jesus, we also know that this world is only a chapter, or a page to be turned, amongst a book that allows for our eternal life. All of our accomplishments will someday fade away and while our name might be remembered, this world will no longer be not ours, but someone elses. Yes, we are here to make a difference, but that difference isn’t about the what we do, but the how we do it and today, God is giving each of an opportunity to indelibly leave our mark by who we are and how we might touch another person and provide them an example of how Christ lived. Among all the things in our world, which are also gifts from God for us to experience, let us not take for granted that the short time we are here, that our purpose remains, day-in and day-out, to bring Him glory and to multiply His Kingdom.

Reference: 1 John 2:17 (New Living Testament)