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 2563: Just Imagine

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“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.”

We say it all the time, “Just imagine…” The problem is that many people can’t really imagine.  We are people who are mostly tied to what we know and then we relate that to what someone has already created and then go from there.  We used to run into this in video games all the time.  Imagine and create a character, or wait until someone has created it and then replicate into a video game?  The lesser risk path is the latter.  So, it is good to put people in a room to imagine and brainstorm, but be ready that there will be one or two people who will lead and the rest of the group will just follow.  But, everyone can think and thinking is what we also need.  C.S. Lewis wrote in the book, Miracles; “To think, then, is one thing, and to imagine is another. What we think or say can be, and usually is, quite different from what we imagine or picture; and what we mean may be true when the mental images that accompany it are entirely false.  It is, indeed, doubtful whether anyone except an extreme visualist who is also a trained artist ever has mental images which are particularly like the things he is thinking.”  For the rest of us we are lucky to have others who can capture it for us.

Lewis gave us this quite in the context of understanding the miracles that God can do.  Since we can’t imagine, much less predict or even understand the scope and the power of the God’s miracles, it just makes more sense to practice faith (believing in those things we can’t yet see).  We are bound by the time that we have been on the earth, that is our understanding and therefore our jumping off point for what we can imagine and understand.  Before the airplane was invented, no one would have imagined rockets or flying saucers.  This is what God does with us.  He is performing miracles all around and through us.  We are one of His miracles, but we just don’t have a context to put it into….yet.  So today, let’s not waste a miracle.  Let’s imagine that what God is doing with us today is part of the bigger miracle He has in store for us and all whom we will enounter.  That, we should be able to imagine.

Reference:  Hebrews 11:1 (New Living Translation)