Rod Beckstrom

Author 

Rod Beckstrom 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 bestselling book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations that presents a new model for analyzing organizations, leadership styles and competitive strategy.

At the extreme, all organizations behave either like centralized, top down spiders, or like decentralized, collaborative starfish. Understanding the difference can be the key to success. Rod has spoken with and studied hundreds of organizations in sixty countries around the world. He sees a rise in the power of starfish and hybrid organizations like YouTube, eBay, Toyota, LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, AA, al Qaeda, and Facebook, among others.

These organizations are highly disruptive to traditional markets, business and society, but their techniques can be understood and leveraged. The pendulum of power is swinging toward a new model of organizations and leadership. To be effective, leaders must understand why the catalysts who start or guide starfish-like networks can be very different from traditional CEO's.

Rod has started many organizations of both types. He co-founded CATS Software Inc. during graduate school and later took it public as Chairman and CEO. He also co-founded Mergent System, American LegalNet and numerous other start-ups. On the non-profit side he co-founded Global Peace Networks which seeded a decentralized peace network of CEO's that grew to more than 4,000 participants, SV2 (Silicon Valley Social Venture), the Environmental Markets Network, as well as the Miracle Wine Fund for Micro-lending. This fund helped move more than $20 million into micro-lending projects globally. He is a Director of Jamii Bora Africa Ltd., a micro-lending network with 170,000 members. He has also been involved in the development of environmental and global warming markets as a Trustee of Environmental Defense Fund.

Rod's interest in decentralized business systems led to his current fascination with wikis and other collaboration tools. These can transform teamwork and productivity within organizations. He is now Chairman and Chief Catalyst of TWIKI.NET, which supports TWiki, the industry-leading open source wiki and collaboration platform with more than two million users.

Rod graduated from Stanford with a BA and MBA. He served as President of the combined Stanford student body and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He has spoken in more than twenty countries to groups such as Google, Microsoft, Young President's Organization, Starbucks, EO, Infosys, Commonwealth Club, and Web 2.0.

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