Brief summary
Lois Kelly is an international marketing strategist, executive leadership coach, successful author and dynamic speaker. She helps executive management teams understand what matters most to their employees and customers, inspires adaptive corporate cultures and creates behavioral strategies to realize marketing and organizational change goals.
Following her pioneering work in word of mouth marketing and social media strategy, Lois’ latest passion focuses on harnessing the power of “corporate rebels” in order to activate more engaged and innovative corporate cultures. She believes that passionate rebels are behind all great business success stories.
I believe that we are smarter than me.
That’s the simple but profound belief I carry as I help you solve thorny problems and figure out how to achieve business results faster and better.
I’m the fire starter and unusual question-asker, bringing your people together in new ways to uncork their collective ideas, ignite new thinking, and together find ways to achieve what you’ve always thought was possible, but didn’t quite know how to get at.
Two years ago I had three revelations as I was working with my Fortune 500 clients.
- The ideas that solve the big issues and opportunities come from the collective brilliance of the people inside the company.
- When organizations have a clear, strong purpose and vision they are able to solve those big issues with grace, smarts, and speed.
- Social power opens up new ways to lead, and more ways for people without official titles to lead. It also asks our current leaders to adapt new leadership practices if they are to be effective.
So while I’m enormously proud of my accomplishments in marketing and strategic communications, I’m enjoying this greater challenge of helping organizations define their purpose, activate their people, and learn how to engage both to grow faster and with more joy.
My passion?
- Creating clarity from complexity. I dig to find the essence of an issue, see the real root causes, and find the simple but significant ways forward. I’ve learned time and again, the best solutions are often amazingly simple. But to get there requires playing in the messiness of complexity and asking unusual questions.
- Finding possibilities: I have a passion for helping organizations and executives see possibilities and figure out how to make them real.
- Activating leaders: helping more people to lead, in more new ways. Doing so helps people and organizations spot ideas and opportunities early, adapt quickly, make good decisions faster, and create meaningful relationships that matter.
- Creating stories and narratives that influence, persuade, motivate and inspire. All companies have the inspiration for these stories, but few know how to find them, pull them out, and tell them in a passionate, compelling way. Marketing, workplace communications, and sales are all about telling stories. Not “messaging to” people.
The values I bring to you
- Make a difference to your organizations and your colleagues
- Be revelatory, insightful, catalyzing
- More joy and fun in the hard work of creating new business strategies, solving gnarly problems
- The discipline to listen in new ways
- Make meaning, not buzz
- Letting go as a leader and learning how to find the right answers by asking new questions, involving more people
- The courage to take a new path to get where you want to go
My best partners are…
- Executives intent on making a difference in the world.
- Organizations going through transition.
- Companies trying to sell more effectively in innovative or changing industries.
- Non-profits passionate about more effectively raising money for their causes
Career short version
In the 1980s I helped some of the most famous — and sometimes outright crazy – high tech companies go from geek squads to global business leaders. In the 1990s, I jumped into the dot com mania, co-founding a digital marketing agency Thunder House, acquired by a major communications conglomerate. In the mid 2000’s I dove into word of mouth marketing and social media, publishing the award winning book Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing in 2007. I also wrote Be the Noodle: 50 Ways to be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver, part memoir, part how-to instruction manual, part love story about helping my mother die at home.
My current passion is helping leaders create thriving corporate cultures that attract talent, adapt quickly to opportunities, and outperform the competition.
Career long version
- Started as a journalist, writing obits and weddings, covering fires and local political races
- Executive in public relations agencies (some NYC boutiques you’ve never heard of and Weber Shandwick)
- Co-founder and president of early interactive marketing agency (Thunder House), acquired by McCann Erickson
- Clients: FedEx, SAP, Fidelity, Monster.com, HP, Sapient, Communispace, Harvard Business School Publishing, Dunkin’ Donuts, TJX, DST Output, The Conference Board.
- Education: University of New Hampshire, Harvard University
- Books: wrote Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing, the gold medal recipient of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Award for best marketing/advertising/public relations book and the 2008 finalist in the Berry-American Marketing Association Book Awards, and Be the Noodle: 50 Ways to be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver, part memoir, part how-to instruction manual, part love story about helping my mother die at home, recently named book of the month by the International Association of Hospice & Palliative Care.
- Non-profit work: officer/trustee of Trinity Rep Theater; founding fellow, Institute of Coaching, a Harvard Medical School affiliate; motivational speaker for hospices, sharing my family’s end-of-life care journey.
- Speaking: speaking and leading workshops at global conferences have been a cornerstone of my 30-year professional career. Consistently rated “exceeded expectations,” “extraordinary,” “If you ever have a chance to see Lois Kelly in action,” do not miss it.”
- Research: have conducted numerous research studies to explore and provide clarity around emerging trends. My most recent study (2011) is on an emerging leadership issue: “Rebels at Work: Motivated to Make a Difference.”
- Specialized training: Appreciative Inquiry, Immunity to Change, Courage to Lead, Art of Hosting, World Café
What does Foghound mean?
We’re like hounds sniffing possibilities and creating clarity amid the dense organizational fog. An executive once told me that there are “fog hounds” in Amsterdam who help boats navigate the canals amid the fog, but I’ve yet to have this story confirmed. My dog is a chocolate Lab, named Maia, after the Greek goddess of spring.