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 2649: Christmas in July

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“That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”

Yesterday, I was given the honor to speak at St. Andrew, Lutheran Church here in Rhode Island. At the two services, I delivered my message; “Why we need Christmas in July”.  Christmas in July has been around in the US since 1940 and has become something of a marketing and sales event since.  I was surprised to learn that the Hallmark channel shows continuous Christmas themed programming from July 12th through July 28th. Christmas in July is a big business for many companies and it is a reminder that if something can be commercialized, it will.  It doesn’t mean it should be.  It just means it will.

My message was that not only do we need Christmas in July, we need Christmas every day.  Christmas is the time when we celebrate that Jesus was born into our earthly life so that we could relate to Him and for Him to suffer beyond anything we could expect and to die an earthly death for us, for our sins, so that there could be His resurrection; forever cementing Him as God and Savior.  Christmas gives us hope that there is more than the pain and suffering that we go through during the July’s of our lives because if Jesus went through it and more, then there really is a beyond, and a future, and a reason to persevere through whatever life throws at us. It’s not easy to hold on to this during our roughest of times, but when Christmas resides in our hearts we can know that there is still the best to come.

Merry Christmas!

Reference: 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18 (New Living Translation)