Rod Beckstrom

Rod Beckström is an entrepreneur and catalyst who has successfully created new businesses and changed established ones through his creative ideas, powerful concepts and passion. He co-authored the bestseller The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations that presents a new model for analyzing organizations, leadership style and competitive strategy.

When Rod speaks he changes people's lives and organizations' strategies.

He does this by sharing from the heart his own stories of high technology, international finance, micro-finance, environmental work, and stories from his experience-rich travels to more than sixty countries around the globe. He has visited the palaces of kings and titans, worked with the rocket scientists in Silicon Valley, done business in thirty-five countries, interviewed people in war zones and even lived in a mud hut in the poorest slum in Africa. From his extensive interactions with people from all levels of society in the Middle East and Africa, Rod can share valuable fresh perspectives with political and business decision-makers, and the general public.

Rod believes in people and Rod believes in miracles. More specifically he believes that all people are capable of producing miracles. All we have to do is tap into our own passions and those of others, and focus on pursuing them with clear intent, collaboration and action. Rod presents clear tools to help unleash this energy.

Every person wants to contribute to the world in some way. Every person also wants to contribute to her or his organization. Rod's gift is being able to present stories, tools and frameworks that help people unleash the incredible potential they have as humans to transform any situation. To hear Rod speak is to be inspired about what you can do individually and collectively to change the world.

Rod has been a successful entrepreneur and stimulating catalyst in many different environments. He started his first company when he was 24 in a garage apartment and grew it into a global enterprise with offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Geneva, Sydney, Palo Alto, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. That company, CAT'S Software Inc., went public and was later sold successfully.

He has helped to start more than a half dozen non-profit groups and initiatives including Global Peace Networks which seeded a peace network of CEO's that now has more than 4,000 participants, SV2 (Silicon Valley Social Venture), the Environmental Markets Network, and the Miracle Wine Fund for Micro-lending which has helped move more than $20 million into micro-lending projects globally.

Rod is currently fascinated with wikis, a new collaborative software technology, and how they fundamentally transform teamwork and productivity inside companies and across society. Rod serves as Chairman of Global Peace Networks, Trustee of Environmental Defense, Director of Jamii Bora Africa Ltd., a micro-lending group with 140,000 members, and Chief Catalyst of a software company in stealth mode.

Rod graduated from Stanford with an MBA and a BA with Honors and Distinction. He served as President of the combined Stanford student body and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

He lives with his wife and two children in Palo Alto and Santa Cruz California

When Rod speaks, organizational strategies change and lives are touched. Rod has been an active speaker since he was President of the undergraduate and graduate student body at Stanford. He loves public speaking and connecting with people. These are his current areas of focus:

The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

In his innovative keynote, Rod teaches your audience that although spiders and starfish may look alike, starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.

But starfish don't just exist in the animal kingdom. Rod's powerful current day examples will explain how Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Your audience will learn how starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. The principles that Rod will teach are break-through and vital to any business, organization or individual that wants to thrive versus die in the new marketplace. Rod will clearly identify the traits and business practices of Spider organizations vs. Starfish organizations. How has Toyota leveraged starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford? How did tiny Napster cripple the global music industry Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craig list crippling the global newspaper industry? Why is Al Qaeda flourishing and even growing stronger? Spider organizations are centralized and are built around org charts; on the other hand, Starfish organizations tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communication - around ideologies like Al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. And the Internet has helped them flourish.

So in today's world Starfish organizations are starting to gain the upper hand. And there's no reason that more traditional organizations can not learn and apply the Starfish principles. Your audience will find it essential to understand the potential strength of a Starfish organization.

Sub-themes:

Leadership - how catalysts lead versus CEOs

Strategy - how your organization can learn, react and win in the new environment

Culture - is your organization a starfish or a spider? What do you want it to be?

Global Warming

Why is global warming a problem and what can you do about it in your company and your life? What is your carbon footprint and how can you reduce it? How can your company capitalize on global warming business opportunities and become more sustainable? Why are sustainable companies often so profitable? How can you get there? How do carbon markets work? Why should we as a society have hope? Rod has thirteen years of experience in global warming science, policymaking, business and investment. He is an acknowledged expert and was recently interviewed by CNBC News on what it means to be carbon neutral. He has served on the Board of Trustees of since 1994 and recently came up with the idea of an Environmental Markets Network, a new national organization recently launched. He is a founder of Carbon Investments which has helped start several large scale carbon offset projects in Third World countries and which has invested in clean energy companies and funds.

Passion Networking

What are your passions? What are those of the people you work with or encounter? People can perform miracles when they are organized in small circles or groups around their passions. How did twelve citizens come together in London in the late 18th century to start a movement that led to the end of slavery? How did a few women organize in the U.S. and start a movement to win women's right to vote?

How did eleven CEOs meeting in 2003 help launch the current peace process between India and Pakistan, opening borders, airways, trade and telecoms where they had long been shut? Rod was a member of that original group of eleven and has studied and participated in many other amazing circles and networks on four continents. Why do some circles and networks thrive while others die? What are some of the traits of successful circles and networks? How can you start a circle? How can you build a network? Everyone has something to contribute. Learn how to unleash the unstoppable power of people's passions.

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