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 2858: Longing For The Future

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“…I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far better for me.”

I can’t think of a time in my own life when I have longed more for a time to just be over than I have right now.  It’s a hard moment to wrestle with when what the future may portend is not what we want it to be and the only way forward is to do all we can personally, and then just wait and see what happens next.  It is wearing on me, and I am guessing I am not alone. In times like these, it is when we have to remind ourselves of the bigger picture and do the best we can to reorient our perspective to there.  The lessons we are learning now are also good for how we think about significant and long term business cycle and industrial emphasis shifts. It’s never been good enough to ignore the future because the present is so good, but we tend to do that over and over.  Maybe, for at least a generation or two we will be reminded that what we have now can be taken from us, without warning, so we need to be better at spending time talking and planning for the future.

Heaven.  It’s our future and worth longing for.  Longing, as Paul uses the word, to be with Christ does not mean we are giving up on life or holding some death wish, but instead it means that we are elongating our perspective beyond the life we have now.  I personally really like Randy Alcorn’s view of Heaven and whether his is right, or wrong, when we consider that Heaven is the final destination, then what is going on with us now, or in our earthly future is no more than growing pains in the pursuit of a time which will not only be better, but will be perfect.

Reference:  Philippians 1:23 (New Living Translation)