Rod Beckstrom's Speech Topics:

1) 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 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 has free, community based Wikipedia crushed Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craigslist crippling the global newspaper industry? Why is Al Qaeda flourishing and even growing stronger? Spider organizations are centralized and are built around organizational 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?

2) Cybersecurity: Tools for proactively preparing on your business against a cyber-terrorism attack

   We live in a world where international cyber-terrorism poses a threat, not only to national security, but to our personal and financial well-being. Rod Beckstrom provides a compelling overview of the technology, strategic and economic risks, and mitigation concepts that every business leader needs to know. He translates his experience as the former Director of the National Cybersecurity Center, and his leadership role as CEO of several high-tech companies, to frame the cyber-terrorism threat. He also explains the actions we all can take to protect personal, business, and national security.  

·        What are the special risks that you and your company face?

·        How do you communicate the cyber-terrorism threat to your employees?

·        How do cyber-security threats impact your strategic planning?

·        What does every organizational leader need to know to be more proactive?

·        What can be done to minimize operational disruption?

·        What can your country do to establish an effective cyber strategy?

3) Global Warming, Carbon Markets and Carbon Offsets

   Why is global warming a problem and what can you do about it in your company and your life? What is your company’s carbon footprint and how can you reduce it? How can your company generate or sell carbon offsets? How much are they worth and why? 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 fourteen 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 [www.ed.org Environmental Defense] since 1994 and recently came up with the idea of an Environmental Markets Network, a new national organization recently launched. He helped start one large scale carbon offset project in Pakistan which is already reducing more than one million tons of CO2 annually and has helped initiate other major carbon offset projects. He has helped to design and build pollution markets and has a unique understanding of how they work.



About Rod Beckstrom

   Rod Beckstrom is a highly successful entrepreneur, founder and CEO of a publicly-traded company, a best-selling author, avowed environmentalist, public diplomacy leader and, formerly the head of a top-level federal government agency entrusted with protecting the nation’s communication networks against cyber attack. In July of 2009, Rod was appointed President and CEO of ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He has resigned as of 2012. ICANN is a non-profit entity with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

   Throughout 2008, Rod served as the Director of the National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he reported to the Secretary of DHS, and was charged with cooperating directly with the Attorney General, National Security Council, Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Prior to joining DHS, he served on the DNI’s Senior Advisory Group. Rod is unique in having experienced the inner workings of two, highly-charged, often competing, federal security agencies created in the wake of the September 11th attacks, an event that he says, “changed my life.” In March of 2009, Rod resigned from his position with Homeland Security.

   Rod is widely regarded as a pre-eminent thinker and speaker on issues of cybersecurity and related global issues, as well as on organizational strategy and leadership. He is also an expert on how carbon markets and “green” issues affect business. While Director of the NCSC, Rod developed an effective working group of leaders from the nation's top six cybersecurity centers across the civilian, military and intelligence communities. His work led to his development of a new economic theory that provides an explicit model for valuing any network, answering a decades-old problem in economics.

   Rod co-authored four books including The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, a best-selling model for analyzing organizations, leadership styles, and competitive strategy. The Starfish and the Spider has been translated into 16 foreign editions and is broadly quoted.

   At age 24, Rod started his first company in a garage apartment and, subsequently, grew it into a global enterprise with offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Geneva, Sydney, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. CATS Software Inc., went public and later sold. Nobel Laureates Myron Scholes and William F. Sharpe served on the company's boards of directors and advisors. While at CATS, Rod helped advance the financial theory of “value at risk,” now used globally for all key banking risk management. Rod co-edited the first book to introduce “value at risk.” Rod also co-founded Mergent Systems, a pioneer in inferential database engines, which Commerce One later acquired for $200 million. He has co-launched other collaborations, software, and internet service businesses, as well. From 1999 to 2001, he served as Chairman of Privada, Inc, a leader in technology enabling private, anonymous, and secure credit card transactions over the internet.
 
   In 2003, Rod co-founded a global peace network of CEO's which initiated Track II diplomatic efforts between India and Pakistan. The group’s symbolic actions opened the borders to people and trade, and contributed to ending the most recent Indo-Pak conflict. It's one of several non-profit groups and initiatives Rod has started. He now serves on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund, which Fortune Magazine ranked as one of the seven most powerful boards in the world and Jamii Bora Trust an innovative micro-lending group in Africa with more than 200,000 members.

   He is a graduate of Stanford University with an MBA and a BA with Honors and Distinction. He served as Chairman of the Council of Presidents of the combined Stanford student body (ASSU) and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.