Ken Stearns

Ken Stearns spent 25 years building and leading insurance sales organisations across 15 countries in Asia, then drove to 96 American cities and asked 330 strangers what makes a life worth living.

Ken Stearns is a leadership speaker, author and distribution executive based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Over 25 years he built and ran agent sales organisations across 15 countries, rising to Chief Agency Officer at Prudential in both Vietnam and Indonesia, where he led forces of 100,000 and 250,000 agents, and to Deputy CEO of Phu Hung Life. He has worked across AIG, AIA, Sun Life, Prudential, Generali and SunGard, and has delivered more than 1,000 presentations to agents, leaders and executives around the region.

He is the author of Dear God, and of Dear Leaders: Letters on Leadership from 15 Countries, due January 2027. Between 2022 and 2024 he recorded 330 long-form conversations with strangers in 96 American cities for his podcast The Jar.

He speaks on cross-cultural leadership, building distribution in emerging markets, and the human side of leading people.

• 25 years in insurance distribution across 15 countries; 20 years living and working in Asia
• Chief Agency Officer, Prudential Vietnam (100,000 agents, 200+ offices, all 63 provinces)
• Chief Agency Officer and Board member, Prudential Indonesia (250,000 agents, 400+ offices, 163 cities, #1 market share)
• Deputy CEO, Phu Hung Life, Vietnam
• Senior distribution roles at AIG, AIA, Sun Life, Generali and SunGard
• 1,000+ presentations delivered to agents, leaders and executives across the region
• Author, Dear God; author, Dear Leaders: Letters on Leadership from 15 Countries (January 2027)
• Host, The Jar / Mental Health Today / The Humanist; 500+ episodes; 330 interviews across 96 US cities
• Co-Founder and CEO, Agenticly (AI for insurance talent)
• Past President, Toastmasters Club 5510, Los Angeles; MDRT Special Invitee

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.

Four keynote topics, and a menu of sixteen shorter signature sessions that can be combined into workshops or built into a conference track.

What 25 years and 15 countries teach you about leading people who see the world differently.

Ken has run sales organisations in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, India, China, Hong Kong and the United States. The same leadership move that lands in one of those places fails in the next. This talk is about which principles actually travel, which ones do not, and how to tell the difference before it costs you a team.

Audience: Corporate leadership teams, multinationals, regional heads, leadership development programmes

Audience takes away:

• What transfers across cultures and what never will
• How to read a room you did not grow up in
• Practical frameworks drawn from real cross-cultural leadership, not theory

Format: 45 to 60 minute keynote, or 3 to 4 hour workshop

How you recruit, develop and keep a salesforce where it is hardest.

Ken built and led agent forces of 100,000 and 250,000 people in Vietnam and Indonesia. This session covers what actually drives a distribution engine: replacement rates, activation, leader productivity, and the structural choices most organisations get wrong. It is a numbers talk delivered by someone who has had to live with the numbers.

Audience: Insurance and financial services, sales organisations, HR and talent leadership across Asia

Audience takes away:

• The two levers that move recruitment, and how to tell which one is broken
• Why campaigns spike and only structure holds
• What an ageing production base looks like before it becomes a crisis

Format: 45 to 60 minute keynote, or half-day workshop

The inner work behind the people who lead well.

Strategy is the easy half. Ken draws on Dear God and on 330 conversations with strangers to look at what self-awareness, forgiveness and purpose have to do with whether people stay, perform and trust you. Honest rather than sentimental, and grounded in a career of leading people under real commercial pressure.

Audience: Senior executives, leadership development, HR conferences, culture and wellbeing programmes

Audience takes away:

• Why the questions that matter most in business are the ones that matter most in life
• Developing leaders from the inside out
• What retention actually costs when you get this wrong

Format: 45 to 60 minute keynote, or half-day workshop

What 96 American cities taught one executive about paying attention.

In 2022 Ken left a Deputy CEO role, bought a van and drove across America asking strangers the same questions. This is the story of what he heard, and what it changed about how he leads. A keynote with real human material in it, suited to opening or closing a conference.

Audience: Conference keynote, sales and customer experience teams, communication and culture events

Audience takes away:

• Listening as a commercial skill, not a soft one
• How to ask a question that gets a true answer
• Why people tell the truth to strangers and not to their manager

Format: 30 to 45 minute keynote

Sixteen shorter modules drawn from Ken's Rules, the leadership principles behind Dear Leaders. Each runs 20 to 45 minutes and works as a conference breakout, a workshop module, or a building block for a longer programme. They are grouped into four themes.

• Strategy, Structure, People. Fix the organisation in that order. Lock the strategy, lay the structure out as empty boxes, and only then put names in them. Used to rebuild agency organisations in four countries.
• Tom Yum Team Building. A great team is built like the soup: distinct, strong ingredients that would overpower on their own, balanced by the person doing the cooking.
• Shiny Things. Why organisations chase the new thing at the exact moment they should be finishing the last one.
• Rule of Momentum. Getting a business moving is hard, stopping it is harder, and most leaders underestimate both.

• Delegate, Delegate, Delegate. The five-step ladder from doing it yourself to transferring the skill entirely, and why teams grow exponentially once you climb it.
• Wok vs Clay Pot Thinking. Some problems need high heat and constant motion. Others need low heat and time. Matching your thinking to the moment.
• Power of Failure. Learning happens when people try things. What it takes to build an organisation where they still will.
• Root Cause. The courage to fix the cause rather than manage the symptom, and why most organisations settle for the symptom.

• Psychology vs Sociology. Selling to one person and selling to a room are different disciplines. Most leaders use the wrong one.
• Confessional. How trust is actually earned, told through a team Ken inherited and the moment it turned.
• Rice Bowl. The shared bowl as a model for collaboration, sustenance and belonging.
• Umbrella Leadership. When to shield your team from the storm and when to deliberately let them get wet.

• Buffalo Theory. An organisation moves at the speed of its slowest members. Why healthy attrition is not cruelty.
• Cost Cutting is Counter-Productive. The phrase itself triggers hoarding and defeatism. What to say instead when the money really is tight.
• Memorize, Internalize, Personalize. How to deliver a message that carries the right words and the right emotion, in your own voice.
• Horizon Thinking. Doing the things today that get you somewhere you cannot yet see.

• Conference keynote (30 to 60 minutes)
• Half-day and full-day leadership workshops
• Executive offsites and leadership retreats
• Fireside chats and panel moderation
• Agency and sales conventions, kickoffs and incentive events
• Corporate L&D and culture programmes
• Virtual keynotes and workshops

Ken tailors every talk to the audience and prefers time with the group, or with a sample of them, before the event.

More than 1,000 presentations delivered across 15 countries over 25 years, to audiences ranging from a dozen executives around a table to agency conventions of several thousand. Selected engagements below.

• Sept 2026 · AGEAS · CAO Recruitment Summit, Bangkok, Thailand. Keynote and working session on the recruitment engine, to 18 to 20 Chief Agency Officers from 9 insurers across 8 countries
• 2025 · AGEAS APEX Asia · MDRT convention, Pattaya, Thailand. Stay at the Top, plus an MDRT Brand Mastery workshop and workbook
• Jan 2025 · AGEAS partner insurer, Harbin, China. Agency leadership and distribution
• 2025 · TaiPing Life, China. Career sharing session to agency leadership
• 2024 · Generali Vietnam, Vietnam. MDRT-focused agent development workshop series
• 2024 · Toastmasters, Vietnam. Thriving in a VUCA World

Two decades of internal and industry speaking as the executive responsible for the audience in the room.

• 2020–2022 · Deputy CEO, Phu Hung Life, Vietnam. Company-wide addresses, distribution strategy, leading through COVID
• 2019–2020 · Agency Development Advisor, Future Generali India. Global ROAR programme rollout across markets
• 2016–2018 · Agency Development Director, Prudential Thailand. Leadership conferences, strategic plan rollout
• 2015–2016 · Chief Agency Officer and Board member, Prudential Indonesia. Agency conventions, kickoffs and incentive events for a 250,000 agent force across 163 cities
• 2012–2015 · Chief Agency Officer, Prudential Vietnam. Agency events, contest launches and branch roadshows across all 63 provinces, 100,000 agents
• 2010–2012 · SVP Sales, SunGard (FIS). Industry and client presentations across 13 Asian markets
• 2005–2007 · Regional Agency Development, AIG and AIA. Chaired the regional agency committee from Hong Kong; rolled needs-based selling out to 100,000 agents in 6 countries

Vietnam · Indonesia · Thailand · China · Hong Kong · India · Singapore · Malaysia · Philippines · Japan · Korea · Australia · New Zealand · Taiwan · United States

• The Jar. 330 long-form recorded conversations with strangers across 96 American cities, 2022 to 2024, which became The Jar Foundation.
• Mental Health Today and The Humanist. Two ongoing podcasts, 500+ episodes hosted in total.
• Dear God. Published author, 48 letters on self-reflection and a life well lived.
• Dear Leaders: Letters on Leadership from 15 Countries. Publishing January 2027.
• LinkedIn. Approximately 19,000 followers, writing regularly on leadership and distribution.
• Letters to Leaders. Newsletter, 1,700+ subscribers.

• Past President, Toastmasters Club 5510, Los Angeles
• MDRT Special Invitee, Toronto, 2008
• Continuing Education instructor, Life and Health, State of California, 1997 to 2000
• Dale Carnegie sales training, 13 week programme, 1991
• BS Accounting, University of South Carolina