Alan Kelly

CEO, founder of The Playmaker’s Standard™, and author of THE ELEMENTS OF INFLUENCE

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Biography

Alan Kelly, CEO and founder of The Playmaker’s Standard™, is a leading authority in competitive strategy and an innovator in the fields of communication, research, and marketing. He approaches his work with a simple but provocative charter—that the moves and countermoves of business, politics, ...

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Alan Kelly, CEO and founder of The Playmaker’s Standard™, is a leading authority in competitive strategy and an innovator in the fields of communication, research, and marketing. He approaches his work with a simple but provocative charter—that the moves and countermoves of business, politics, and pop culture can be mapped and managed for competitive advantage.

His development of a breakthrough taxonomy of strategy types, which shares the company’s name, is testament to Kelly’s vision for a comprehensive standard in the industries of influence—of management, strategy, marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, public affairs, and even law. It is a system that names, describes, and prescribes the work of playmakers everywhere and that exhaustively catalogues, as his critically acclaimed book describes, THE ELEMENTS OF INFLUENCE.

Kelly, 49, has made his mark on the business landscape, notably in Silicon Valley through his formation and leadership of Applied Communications, an award-winning public relations and research firm that earned distinction for its unique philosophy of competitive communications and quantitative grounding. From its founding in 1992 to the sale of its assets in 2003, the firm garnered numerous best-in-class recognitions for its work with Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Genentech, VeriSign, Veritas Software, BEA Systems, TechNet, and Informatica, among others.

Kelly is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society and serves on the board of trustees of The Institute for Public Relations. He holds a Master’s Degree in Communication Research from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Relations from the University of Southern California. He lives with his wife and two children in Maryland and is an enthusiastic sailboat racer.

Check out Alan’s website at www.plays2run.com.

 
Speaking Topics
  • Plays for the Presidency
    Moves and countermoves of the 2008 Amazing Race
  • Cracking the Code of the Spinmeisters, From the D.C. Beltway to Silicon Valley
  • Oprah’s Secret
    The code-cracking system of great marketing and power politics
  • The Ping and the Peacock
    From Greenspan to Obama…the moves of business, politics, and cyber culture
  • “The PC Is a Ridiculous Device”
    How billionaire Larry Ellison sparked a brainstorm in the art and science of spin
  • “I Already Know How High I’m Flying!”
    From barnstormers to bloggers – lessons in the science of spin
  • Bloodsport
    You run plays. Plays are run on you. And here’s how it works.
  • The Periodic Table of Spin
    A landmark system for calling, running, reading, and countering the moves of business, politics, and cyber culture
  • The Anatomy of Spin
    Why spinners and strategists should be licensed
  • Why PR Is Strategic and Advertising Isn’t
    Breakthrough analysis in the games of marketing
  • A Bad Reputation
    The new system that explains why PR is the most misunderstood profession…and the most powerful
  • What Ever Happened to Competition?
    How reputation managers are missing the point and hurting your company
  • A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
    The system behind the smile (of marketers, salespeople, PR reps, ad execs, lobbyists and politicians)

Featured Book

Featured book's cover THE ELEMENTS OF INFLUENCE "...For those who wish to better understand and deconstruct the spin, manipulation, and deceit with which they are confronted daily, THE ELEMENTS OF INFLUENCE will be invaluable." —The Holmes Report Buy Books now!