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 2544: Paper Hacked?

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“…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth…”

I’ve long been looking for the perfect password manager.  Every time I dig into it, I get paralyzed with which one is the best and which one will be the easiest to convert with.  And then, that is where I get stuck.  Plus, there’s also the still unknown danger of sending all our information into a single cloud service that then when hacked, it gets everything all at once. I was reading an article about password manager decisions in the Wall Street Journal and it appears that I am far from being alone in my hesitancy but, that doesn’t absolve me from making that decision.  In the meantime, there is interesting advice from a security researcher at the Open Crypto Audit Project.  Kenneth White wrote that “another cybersecurity-expert-approved method for managing passwords that might surprise you: Write them down on a sheet of paper and keep it in a safe place.  Honestly, for some accounts writing it down is pretty good advice. You can’t be hacked from paper.”  That makes you think doesn’t it?  What it also says to all of us that sometimes if we can’t get ourselves to the cutting edge, that the old-fashioned ways can still hold up.  What is really dangerous though is to try do things in the middle – like keep all of our passwords on Dropbox that  is unprotected on our computers and can be easily hacked at any time.  That little bit of perceived progress can be the riskiest of all approaches. (Patti, are you reading this? – smile).

As humans we are obsessed with the next way to understand how we can better our lives.  We look for all the secrets (there is even a best-selling book on The Secret) like we are trying to find the one password that opens up everything to us.  There is a password that unlocks the Kingdom of God, but it’s not a secret, it doesn’t need to be hacked to find it, it can’t be replaced by someone other fancy word or algorithm.  It’s just the same as we were told over 2000 years ago.  Ready for it?  It’s one word.  “Jesus”.

Reference: Philippians 2:10 (New Living Translation)