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 2545: Hidden Value

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“In him lie hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

Not every product or service that we create or deliver will end up being the real gem.  In fact, more often or not we will end up pivoting into something else that we discovered along the way.  When that happens it feels like magic, especially when we learn the origins of how it all came to be.  There are famous stories like 3M and Post-it Notes that became B-School case studies.  But, I ran across one recently that was pretty interesting.  Back in June Ted Dabney, a founder of Atari and the creator of Pong died.  He was 81 at his death.  What we likely don’t know about Mr. Dabney was that after Atari and Pong he and Nolan Bushnell (the more notable name out of Atari) went on to create a restaurant chain, Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater.  Chuck E. Cheese’s was very successful on its own, but inside of that concept was created a new product that has now become a standard in many restaurants and bars.  Mr. Dabney created a system for alerting customers when their orders were ready.  Think those buzzing, lighted up pagers.  That patent of that in itself was worth how much?  How do know if we have something that we are missing the value of it, for no other reason that we aren’t thinking about it that way?  Maybe we need to do more looking around.

I spoke this last week at our church in San Francisco; Cornerstone Church.  You can watch the message here if interested. One of the points I made about how to engage with God was to approach our Bible reading time intentionally, asking God to reveal something of an answer to our needs at the time.  I’ve been practicing this now for a while and the Bible has come alive to me again.  The morning that I am writing this post, I asked God to open up and grant me some peace from the clutter of all the things going on around me.  And sure, enough about 15 minutes into my reading in the book of Isaiah was a verse about the peace that is ours to claim from God when we seek Him. The hidden value in God’s Word is unlimited.  All we have to do today, as we prepare to go to work ow whatever is before us today is to look to Him for that for that hidden value.

Speaking of hidden value – hope you are one to find the wishbone tomorrow in the Thanksgiving Turkey!  PwK will be back on Monday.

Reference: Colossians 2:3 (New Living Translation)