Ken Stearns

Ken Stearns has spent his career on a question that does not change from one country to the next: what actually makes people follow a leader, and what makes them leave.

He has had 25 years and 15 countries to work on it. Ken moved to Asia in 2001 with AIG, where he built the region's worksite marketing distribution from scratch, then moved onto the regional agency team and helped institutionalise needs-based selling across 100,000 agents in six countries. Over the following two decades he held senior distribution roles at Sun Life, SunGard, Generali and Prudential, including Chief Agency Officer of Prudential Vietnam, where he ran 100,000 agents across 200 offices in all 63 provinces, and Chief Agency Officer and board member of Prudential Indonesia, the country's number one insurer, with 250,000 agents across 163 cities. He finished his corporate career as Deputy CEO of Phu Hung Life in Vietnam, running operations, HR, IT and distribution through the pandemic.

That work is where his speaking was forged. Running an agent force means standing in front of thousands of commission-paid salespeople who owe you nothing and deciding, in the first two minutes, whether they will listen. Ken has done it in Vietnamese branch offices, Indonesian stadiums, Chinese conventions and Thai kickoffs, more than a thousand times.

Along the way he began writing down what kept proving true regardless of the country. He calls them Ken's Rules, and they carry the names of the places that taught them to him: Tom Yum Team Building, Rice Bowl, Wok versus Clay Pot Thinking, Buffalo Theory, Umbrella Leadership. They are the backbone of his book Dear Leaders: Letters on Leadership from 15 Countries, publishing January 2027.

In 2022 he stopped. He bought a van, drove to 96 American cities, and recorded 330 unscripted conversations with people he had never met, asking each of them the same questions about memory, forgiveness, love and purpose. The project became The Jar, then The Jar Foundation, and then two more podcasts, Mental Health Today and The Humanist, with more than 500 episodes hosted. His first book, Dear God, came out of the same enquiry: 48 letters on self-reflection and a life well lived.

He is now Co-Founder and CEO of Agenticly, applying AI to the recruitment and development of insurance agents, which puts him back inside the problem he spent 25 years living with.

Ken holds a BS in Accounting from the University of South Carolina. He was a past president of Toastmasters Club 5510 in Los Angeles and an MDRT Special Invitee. He is a photographer, a guitarist who started at 54 and went on to copyright five songs, a father and a grandfather. He speaks and works across Asia Pacific and internationally, from Ho Chi Minh City.