Rod Beckstrom

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Rod Beckstrom is an author, high-tech entrepreneur, and Fulbright scholar. He previously served as Chairman and Chief Catalyst of TWIKI.NET, a company which supports TWiki, an open source wiki. He was also co-founder, Chairman and CEO of CATS Software Inc., a derivatives and risk management software company which went public on NASDAQ and later was sold to Misys PLC.

He is co-author of the best-selling The Starfish And the Spider, which lays out a new organizational theory for considering all organizations as existing on a continuum between centralized to decentralized, with different implications and strategies for each firm based upon their position on that axis. In interviews with The Washington Post^[1] and USA Today^[2], Beckstrom explains how, using the 'Starfish' concept illustrated in The Starfish And the Spider, the U.S. Government can take a different approach in their dealings with Al-Qaeda.

An active participant in the non-profit arena, Beckstrom serves on the board of trustees of Environmental Defense Fund, an organization involved in designing, advocating and implementing environmental policy solutions such as the Kyoto Protocol and the California Climate Act. He also a trustee of Jamii Bora Trust, a micro-lending group with 170,000 members, based in Nairobi.

Beckstrom, a pioneer in the field of derivatives trading and firm-wide risk management, was coached by Nobel Laureate Dr. William F. Sharpe, which resulted in the first book on a new theory, "Value at Risk."

In August 2007, Beckstrom and Peter Thoeny, author of TWiki co-launched TWIKI.NET, a new Web 2.0 company.

On March 20, 2008, Beckstrom was appointed to run the newly created National Cyber Security Center^[3] though by all accounts, Beckstrom is not a cyber-security expert.^[4]