Alan Kelly

Alan Kelly, CEO and Founder of Playmaker Systems, LLC, is a visionary business strategist, author, and award-winning Silicon Valley public relations agency CEO. In 2006, Kelly founded Playmaker Systems, a Washington D.C. area management consulting firm specializing in the development and execution of influence strategy. He approaches his work with a simple but provocative charter – that the moves and counter–moves of business, politics, and pop culture can be mapped and managed for competitive advantage.

Kelly's development of a breakthrough periodic table of influence strategies in 2004 is testament to his vision for a comprehensive standard in the industries of influence – namely 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 which is exhaustively catalogued in his landmark book, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz (Penguin Books 2006).

Kelly is an Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University where he teaches a frontier graduate course entitled, Elements of Influence. Through the 2008 Presidential primaries and elections, he co-created and co–hosted Plays for the Presidency on Sirius XM satellite radio, P.O.T.U.S. 130, and its companion blog by the same name. In 2009, Kelly created and launched Playmaker China, a code-cracker's blog to influencers and strategies of the Middle Kingdom.

Earlier, Kelly made his mark on the business landscape through his founding and leadership of Applied Communications Group, a San Francisco-based public relations and research firm that earned distinction for its quantitative grounding and unique philosophy of competitive communications. From its formation 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, PayPal, Veritas Software, BEA Systems, TechNet and Informatica, among others.

Kelly, 51, 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 is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society and a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. Kelly lives with his wife and two children in Maryland and enjoys racing his Etchells one-design sailboat, Playmaker.