Founder & CEO, The Peace OS | Executive Authority Advisor | Strategic Positioning Consultant | Advisor to Founders, C-Suite Leaders, and Senior Operators | Speaker
Born on the Wrong Side of Every Line
Some people spend their whole lives trying to get into the right rooms. Martina Kikic spent hers learning how to keep walking after every door closed in her face.
She was born in a country that no longer exists.
“I was born in a country that no longer exists. I’m a child of a lost childhood.”
The war reached her in her first year. Her family carried the wrong passport in a place that was supposed to be one country, Yugoslavia, and it almost cost them their lives. They ran. They crossed onto the territory that matched their passport, and the people there still wouldn’t have them. They heard the accent, and that was enough.
Novi Sad, then Petrovaradin, then Zaprešić near Zagreb. A Croatian child on Serbian ground, then a child with the wrong dialect once the family moved. She was never on the right side of anyone’s line.
She had no friends at school. The hate the parents carried, the children carried too. So she learned it early, before she was old enough to understand why.
“Don’t wait for anyone to open the door. No one is coming to vouch for you. You knock. If they mock you, you shake the dust off your feet and knock on the next one.”
That isn’t a leadership quote she read somewhere. It’s how she survived being a child nobody wanted around.
Years later, when she was treated as a joke at work more than once, it never broke her the way it was meant to. She had already been through worse at an age when she couldn’t defend herself. Every time the front door closed, she built her own back doors and windows. That refusal to stay outside is what eventually carried her to the United Arab Emirates, and into rooms where the region’s most powerful people made the decisions that shaped companies, industries, and careers.
She Watched Power From the Chair No One Noticed
Her career didn’t start with personal branding. It started with watching.
For more than a decade she was the person in the room but never at the center of it. Executive assistant to some of the most powerful founders and leaders in the region, across more than 45 nationalities. From that seat, you learn to read people fast. You see the two versions of a person.
“You see the version they perform and the version they become when they think the assistant doesn’t count.”
She wasn’t delivering the presentation. She was watching what happened before the meeting started, after it ended, and in the moments when titles stopped mattering. And across all those years and all those nationalities, one pattern kept repeating itself. The leaders whose influence lasted were almost never the loudest people in the room.
“Short-term success sits on two chairs. One is the office, where only their own people see them, and where they make those people small. The other is the public image, polished and praised and quoted. That reputation always cracks.”
Maybe not this quarter. But it cracks.
“Enduring influence has no second chair. The person is the same whether the room is full of investors or full of the people who clean up after the meeting.”
Those years weren’t just a job. They were her real education. She wasn’t studying marketing. She was studying trust. She wasn’t learning how people built visibility. She was learning how they built credibility, up close, from the one seat where nobody performs for you.
The Room That Doesn’t Exist on LinkedIn
She watched the same thing happen for years before she had words for it.
She once sat across from a founder who could walk into any room and own it in under a minute. Then she saw his LinkedIn. Two hundred connections, and a stock photo where his face should be. Two different men, and only one of them existed online.
“The room he built his whole life in doesn’t exist on LinkedIn. Nobody in that feed shook his hand 20 years ago. Nobody remembers the deal he closed or the company he saved.”
The credibility he spent decades earning didn’t walk through the door with him anymore. He had to build it again, in public, from nothing, in front of people who had no reason to care yet.
So he did the only thing that had ever worked. He listed the titles. He wrote the profile like a CV, because the CV is what earned him respect his entire life. And it died on the page. A stranger scrolling at 7am doesn’t care where he worked. Meanwhile someone half his age, with a tenth of his experience, gets the recognition he earned, because they learned to say one true thing and he never did.
Most people look at that and call it a visibility problem. Post more. Make more content. Be louder. Martina saw something else entirely.
“It isn’t that he’s invisible. It’s that he watches less qualified people get seen while everything he built sits in silence.”
She Doesn’t Make People Louder
That belief became The Peace OS, her advisory practice for founders, C-suite leaders, and senior operators whose expertise deserves to be recognized before they ever introduce themselves.
Her work gets mistaken for LinkedIn consulting. It goes much deeper than that. She doesn’t start with algorithms, posting schedules, or content calendars. She starts with how a person actually thinks, decides, and communicates under pressure. The strategy only comes after she understands the human. That’s what lets her turn a profile into something that feels like the person, instead of a performance of them.
It puts her at odds with most of the personal branding industry. She has little interest in making anyone louder. She’s interested in making them understood.
Most of the leaders she advises have already built companies, led global teams, and earned decades of trust behind closed doors. Then someone finds them online for the first time, and none of that history is there. Just another résumé. Another list of titles. Another profile that could belong to anyone. That, she believes, is exactly where opportunities go quietly missing. Advisory conversations, keynote invitations, the introductions that decide a career, most of them are shaped long before the first real conversation. People search. They read. They form an opinion. Only then do they reach out.
Her job isn’t to change who someone is. It’s to make sure the person the internet meets is the same one people already respect in the room.
The Message That Proved Her Right
One client still holds everything she believes about positioning.
Abel Kaszian had spent 15 years building a serious reputation in data protection and enterprise privacy. In person, nobody questioned him for a second. Online, none of it existed. His profile listed his job. It said nothing about the man you actually want in the room when everything is on the line.
“Everyone would call that a visibility problem. Post more, they say. Be louder. It was never that.”
She didn’t ask him to publish more, and she didn’t chase the algorithm. She changed what his profile said in the first three seconds. The qualifications stayed exactly the same. His experience didn’t change. His achievements didn’t change. Only the positioning did.
“Same man. Same 15 years. Said in a way that finally matched who he is when he walks in.”
Three weeks after they finished, her phone lit up with a short message.
“I’m starting in September in Abu Dhabi.”
One line. She read it again just to be sure. For most advisors, that’s a finished project. For Martina, it confirmed something much larger.
“He didn’t become more qualified. He was always qualified. He became understood. And the opportunity, the way it always does, went to the person the reader understood first.”
She doesn’t create authority. She uncovers it.
Why She Called It Peace
Behind all of it is a belief that reaches well past business.
Martina is Catholic, and her faith was the one thing that never left when everything else did. It held through the displacement, the closed doors, and the rebuilding of an entire life in a country that wasn’t hers. It’s also why her company carries a name that surprises people.
“Peace, peace, peace. Be reconciled. Only peace. Make your peace with God and among yourselves.”
The words come from the apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When Croatia finally ran out of doors for her, when employers wanted her and the system refused to approve it and said no on their behalf, she did what she had learned to do as a child. She went looking for doors in another country, and that search is what carried her to the UAE.
She walked straight into a world addicted to more. More money, more travel, more shopping, a better this, a better that. She watched people trade away their own peace to get it, and call the temporary relief peace. It isn’t. Real peace isn’t the next purchase. It’s making things right with the people around you, forgiving, and coming back to yourself.
That belief runs straight through the work, because you can’t sit on two chairs forever, one where your team sees you at your worst and one where the public sees only the glory.
“Hurt people hurt people. Seen people carry something more powerful into every room. I build the second kind.”
There’s a quiet symmetry to what she does now. The girl who was turned away for her accent, who had no one to vouch for her, built the one thing no room in her childhood ever gave her. A door that opens. She looks past the title, the label, the surface, and she finally sees the person underneath. Then she makes sure everyone else can too.
Martina Kikic doesn’t help leaders become someone new. She helps the world see who they’ve been all along.
Martina Kikic is the Founder and CEO of The Peace OS, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She advises founders, C-suite leaders, and senior operators on executive authority, strategic positioning, and translating earned reputation into authentic visibility, and she speaks on these themes to leadership audiences across the region.
