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 646: “There Should Be An App For This”

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“Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does.”

“There should be an ‘App’ for this.” Twenty four months ago, this was becoming a popular saying as people played with their iphones and thought about their soon to arrive ipads. Two years later, as we have our ipads and wait on our ipad 2 and we have upgraded our iphones to newest generation, we say less often, “there should be an App for this” because today, there seems to be just about an “App” for everything so we say more often, “there is an App for that.” In actuality, it’s probably about a few hundred thousand Apps that have been created for the Apple platform and then a fraction of that many for the Android operating system. Still, it now seems that there is an App for about anything, other than some of the more mundane things we may still do at work. But, watch out, those are coming soon. It may well be soon that an ipad for work becomes standard issue. As all of these innovations continue to occur it is important that we stay on top of what is new and that we understand what is coming next. To be most competitive in our field or industry, we have to be ahead of the competition and in touch with the next generation of talent that walks through our doors. To not be in touch with the future is to live in the past. There is no App for telling and understanding the future. That is on us to do.

An App is also a publishing tool that allows a developer and innovator to share his/her creation across the users of a platform and spread this software virally through sharing it with their social graph. Technology is the tool for evangelizing a resource, tool, service, etc. If you think about it, God was ultimately the first App developer in that He created all of us to be the spreaders of His Good News. We are God’s Apps and as we are told in in 1 Chroncicles, we are to be the publishers of his glory. Think about this today and know that God is looking at us and saying in all of the situations that we are given and face, “Here is my app for this.”

Reference: 1 Chronicles 16:24 (New Living Testament)