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 2398: Ticketless

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“My child, never forget the things I have taught you. Store my commands in your heart.”

There’s a controversy brewing in the sports and events world as venue and teams have decided to go paperless.  What does that mean?  That means that those really cool designed tickets that we would receive or pick up won’t soon be there anymore?  Hey, we are going to save a lot of trees, that’s great, right?  On one hand, yes.  On the other, with the removal of physical mementos like tickets we could be removing a layer of memory from many people.  Think for a second, do you have a ticket from the past that you have kept?  You likely do.  Why did you keep it?  Unless it was the last of something, or something record setting happened while you where there, it doesn’t have any value to anyone.  That is no value to anyone, but to you.  And to you, it could be that the memory of that event is so important that the ticket is priceless.  The barcode on our phone, just won’t be the same.  I’m not advocating that we stay with paper tickets, but I am highlighting that the consumer (human) experience is one that values triggers of memories and that we should take that into consideration for the long-term value building of what we provide.

I was trying to think about what the corollary is for our spiritual journey and as I read my Bible this morning, it struck me that while I do have a digital Bible, my paper Bible that is all marked up, underlined and annotated is something very dear and special to me. I can almost remember the times when I underlined a verse or what I did with that verse at the time.  I guess God could have bypassed leaving us His Word as something to hang onto, remember, and place within times of our lives, but He didn’t.  So while there is no ticket to be bought or to be collected when we enter Heaven and there never will be, the importance of storing God’s Word in our hearts will always remain.  How we do it is up to us, we just need to do it.

Reference: Proverbs 3:1 (New Living Translation)