Penguin Speakers Bureau

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, 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.