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 114: Instant Messaging

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How fast technology is moving! When I first went to work I hand wrote or typed out memos and then someone nice in the office pool would retype them and make lots of copies based on the cc list and distribute them around the office for me. Then the word processor showed up and I learned to do some of that myself but I still relied on an assistant/secretary to mimeograph the printed version so that something could be distributed. Then came email. It was primitive at first but it lessened the need for the printed paper. And then in what seemed a blink of an eye email took over, voice mail showed up, then everyone had a cell phone, IMs came to the office to quickly be replaced by texting, Facebook status updates and Tweets from Twitter. Before I am done writing this there will be something else that we will be doing next to quicken the message, shorten the gap of time of reception and feedback, close the connection to people around us, and make the world so small that everyone feels like they are in the same community. This trend is not going to change and we all will need to continue to adapt, stay on top of the technology wave and adopt what is next or risk that we fall behind and become out of touch. All of this “closing in on each other” technology reminds me that we are to keep God even closer to us as we work our way through life. Even way back in Isaiah the prophet told us, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near”. As I read that verse I thought about how we work so hard to keep everyone around us within keystrokes or speed-dialing distance but yet we forget that within our work and our bigger lives that we are to keep God even closer. I love the part of the verse, “call on Him while He is near”. He is always near if we let Him be and when we push Him away all we need to do is call on Him and He comes right back as close as we desire. Today we will email, IM, text and Twitter hundreds of times if not more. How many times though will we call on God? He is right here no further than the thought in our mind before even the action that our hands or mouth would have to take to call upon another human. There is no faster instant message. There is no closer community than the communion we can have with God today, if we so choose!

Reference: Isaiah 55:6 (New Living Testament)