Alan Kelly, CEO and Founder of The Playmaker's Standard, LLC, is a foremost expert in competitive strategy and a leading innovator in the fields of communication, research, and technology marketing.  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.    

Alan Kelly's development of a breakthrough taxonomy of strategy types, "Playmaking", 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 which exhaustively catalogues, as his coming book describes, The Elements of Influence.  

Alan Kelly, 49, has made his mark on the business landscape, notably through his formation and leadership of Applied Communications, a public relations and research firm that earned distinction for its unique philosophy of competitive communications and quantitative grounding.  From its founding in 1992 to its sale 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.  

Alan Kelly is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society and serves on the board of trustees of The Institute for Public Relations.   

Mr. Kelly 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.