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 2669: OK Is Ok

“If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless.”

We use “OK” all the time.  I read that the use of the word is only about 180 years old.  Syntactician, Elly van Gelderan thinks that “OK” was a shortened version of “Oll Korrect”.  However “OK” came about, it is an everyday part of how we speak today. The language we use for selling, presenting and convincing others matters. We won’t always know that is the correct word to use, but we should work hard to be more than okay.

I was reminded last week on how important it is that we check our language if we want to be considered credible in our witness. There will always be the person who decides to use foul language to justify themselves as “relevant” to the culture, but as we know, it takes more energy, smarts and vocabulary to not use four letter words than it is does to use them.  That’s why James said it is so hard to control ourselves.  So, as we start this week, what can we do to be better than okay in this area of our lives?

James 1:26 (New Living Translation)