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 2355: Attention Grabbing

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“This is amazing,” Moses said to himself. “Why isn’t that bush burning up? I must go see it.”

We are in the heart of Trade Show season.  The fist five months of the year are when the trade shows fill convention centers all across the country.  Las Vegas and the warmer climate cities clean up this time of year.  Trade Shows are a funny thing.  As a friend said to me recently, “You can’t afford to go to them and you can’t afford to not go to them”.  I personally find them overwhelming.  I’ve been to many,  both on the floor and behind a booth and invariably, everyone is looking to create the buzz or looking for who has the buzz.  And that is what attention grabbing is all about.  We want to grab the attention of potential customers and we want our attention grabbed.  We all love to tell someone else about what we saw that they didn’t.  So, we must always be questioning ourselves in what are we doing that can capture the attention of customers, consumers, potential employees, analysts, etc.? After all, we do operate within an attention economy where every moment can have value.

So, Moses is on the mountain and he looks over at a burning bush.  For me, that would grab my attention, unless everything else around is on fire and then I wouldn’t be hanging around.  But, then this one bush that he sees doesn’t stop burning.  Moses didn’t know he was seeing the inspiration for gas log fireplaces, he was just seeing something he had never seen before.  His attention had been grabbed by the Almighty God and Moses couldn’t help but go and see more. We all know that God isn’t literally putting burning bushes in front of us anymore, but that doesn’t mean He isn’t attempting to grab our attention each and every day and hour. Let’s today take a good long look around (you actually might already be doing that from Friday’s post about Guesting and Hosting) and see what God is doing in our workplaces that has Him trying to catch our attention.  I’ll guarantee that if you sincerely look, you will see Him today almost like right over there; by what appears to be a burning bush that you never saw before.

Reference: Exodus 3:3 (New Living Translation)