Rod's primary passion is helping social entrepreneurs and other innovative leaders build, scale, and lead high performance social enterprises that deliver innovative, sustainable, and powerful solutions to critical social problems.

Rod spent most of his prior career leading complex, large-scale, organization transformation and improvement efforts, alternating between general management and chief human resource officer roles, domestically and internationally, in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. At Herman Miller, Inc., Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, and VeriSign, Inc, he restructured and led global HR organizations designed to drive improvements in individual, business unit, and corporate performance. While at Herman Miller, an icon of enlightened capitalism and corporate social responsibility, he also served as President of Herman Miller East Asia, and led the turnaround of that organization into the highest performing business unit in the consolidated company. He began his private sector career with IBM in marketing, IS consulting, and government relations, and with Merrill Lynch Capital Markets in investment banking.

Rod was a White House Fellow in the first Bush Administration (41), and served in the State Department as special assistant to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He later served as Assistant Secretary for Management at the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton Administration, where he led the effort to reinvent the $30 billion, 5,000-employee, cabinet-level department into a more strategically managed and high-performance organization. He was the founding CEO of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit he launched on behalf of the Governor of Louisiana to assist victims of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina by better coordinating the humanitarian aid of more than 150 nonprofit, public, and private sector organizations. LFRC was singled out by former President Clinton as a model for cross-sector, domestic disaster relief efforts.

Rod graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics and Religion. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion in Social Ethics from Yale University Divinity School. He earned a Master of Public Policy in Human Services, Labor, and Education Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he was twice selected a Kennedy Fellow.