About the Author

Meet Jim Shields: Author, director, speaker,
and maybe your new best friend

Jim has spent 30 years banging his head against the desk, so you don’t have to.

His journey started at the age of 12, making movies with rudimentary stick figurines and sounds he’d captured in jars. As a young man, he worked as a film cameraman by day, and a performer and stage dramatist by night. But Jim soon returned to directing and founded his own production company, Twist & Shout (now a part of the KnowBe4 family).

Jim soon noticed a consistent theme, a motif, in contemporary business communications. They had all of the excitement, emotion, and flavor of a hanging file folder.

Bolstered by the idea that if you can get people to laugh, you can get them to listen, he applied the dynamics of comedy to the problem of connecting with employees. This lead to security awareness campaigns for Barclays, Sony, Warner Bros, Alcatel-Lucent, Symantec, Verizon, Estee Lauder, and many others.

Eight years ago he created “Restricted Intelligence” – the world’s first sitcom about information security – and co-created the award-winning series “The Inside Man,” available on the KnowBe4 security awareness platform. His campaigns have won awards in both the security industry and the creative industries.

In spite of his work, Jim knew that people in the business world were struggling. Businesses couldn’t create engaging communications, creatives couldn’t create sustainable businesses.

So, he added “author” to his list of skills and wrote the Amazon Bestseller “Three Guys Walk Into a Bar – How to Thrive as a Creative Business” and “Once More With Feeling – The Busy Communicators Guide To Intimacy.”

Jim travels the world talking to entrepreneurs, marketers, and communications specialists, in a bid to inspire and educate. Like many of his tech heroes, he’s delivered a TEDx presentation on how creativity will save the world.

A proud father, Jim likes to sing karaoke and continues his search for Arne Saknussemm’s map to the centre of the earth, to prove his point that chocolate and gravity are, in effect, the same thing. He no longer bangs his head against the desk, opting instead to bang his head on the slightly more forgiving metal file cabinets.

If you’d like Jim to speak at your business or organization, drop him a line. His responses are always fun to read and, as an InfoSec devotee, you know you’ll never get any spam from him.