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 669: The Golden Path

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“Let me hear of your unfailing love each morning, for I am trusting you. Show me where to walk, for I give myself to you.”

When I worked in the fast moving consumer goods business, the sales and marketing team were always talking about the importance of the “golden path”. For those not in the business of selling products in retail, this is the path that a retail store wants to force us to walk as we shop in a store. Grocery stores are the best of the best at this and through the in-aisle displays, end-cap displays and specials they can get almost all of their shopping traffic to walk the same route. If you are a manufacturer and you can get on the golden path at the right point and place, then sales can also become golden. Other businesses also have their own golden path as it relates to customer and consumer interactions. Certainly in the online world driving consumers to the right pages in a sequence can be just as much of an impact as getting someone to walk down a physical store aisle. Even internally we see that we all walk paths, follow routines and process, and systematically do similar things day-to-day, week-to-week and year-to-year. Without a path to follow or a process to subscribe to it would be no wonder why disorganization and randomness may appear in a business. We can all benefit from finding and knowing the golden paths of our businesses and then trying to stay on them.

In our walk with the Lord, He also sets us on His golden path. It is always there, right in front of us to choose to follow, or not. When we trust in Him and follow, we find that He will lead and provide for us as we need. It is when we take our self-inflicted detours that we can find ourselves moving away. The direction signs to the path come from the Word of the Bible, our prayer time and our fellowship with other believers. How hard are we looking for God’s path for us and then once we are on it, how hard are we working to stay consistently on it? If the golden path has seemed to elude us, then today is the day to crack back open that Bible and ask God to show us His way back for us.

Reference: Psalm 143:8 (New Living Testament)