Kelly Sewell Nagel is the founder of Residy, a diagnostic advisory practice built around the Near Enemies framework. She works with senior leaders, leadership teams, and organizations to surface the hidden obstacles, assumptions, and patterns that keep capable people stuck. Her work starts with one question: is the apparent problem actually the problem?

She brings more than two decades of experience across commercial real estate, including institutional investment, development strategy, and organizational leadership. Her work spans public and private platforms, family offices, and founder-led firms, giving her an inside-the-room perspective on how decisions actually get made.

Kelly teaches real estate finance at Georgetown McDonough's Steers Center for Global Real Assets. She is a ULI Trustee and remains actively engaged across the industry.

The book is called Near Enemies. It is about what happens when the virtues high-performers work hardest to develop become the thing in the way.

The through-line across all of it is the same work: taking something genuinely complex and making the actual concept visible. In a university classroom, that means stripping the jargon from a financial framework until a non-specialist can immediately use it. In an advisory engagement, it means identifying the pattern operating underneath a leader's stated problem. The Near Enemies framework is the systematic version of that diagnostic work.