CEO by day.
Storyteller always.

Mission and Margin

Running a Community Health Center Without Losing Either

For: boards, nonprofit leadership, healthcare executives, association meetings

I have spent my entire career inside community health centers. That means I have led through growth, funding uncertainty, workforce shortages, layoffs, changing policy and plenty of decisions where every available option had a real human consequence.

Mission and margin become much less academic when payroll is coming, patients still need care and hundreds of people depend on the organization getting the decision right.

I talk about how I have learned to make those decisions, including the ones I got wrong. We can get into boards, culture, growth, patient access, financial pressure, leadership succession or whatever is sitting closest to the surface for your organization. I am still doing this work every day, which keeps me appropriately humble about pretending there is one formula for doing it well.

You leave with: a way to separate the decisions genuinely forced by the numbers from the ones that were simply easier to justify that way. In my experience the second pile is much bigger than anyone admits out loud in the meeting.

Believe Her the First Time

For: health systems, clinical teams, women’s health organizations, advocacy conferences

I came to women’s health advocacy through the women I love.

My wife, Kellie, and my daughter, Sammie, both live with endometriosis. I watched them spend years trying to get people to understand that something was wrong. That experience changed the way I think about healthcare, listening and the responsibility men have when someone they love is hurting. It also made me look harder at the health system I lead and ask where healthcare has learned to accept delay and dismissal.

This conversation often starts with endometriosis, but it gets much bigger pretty quickly. We talk about what happens when patients stop feeling believed, what primary care could catch sooner, how men show up without making themselves the center of the story and what healthcare organizations should be doing differently.

I do not give this talk as a clinician. I give it as a husband, a dad and a healthcare CEO who has had to look at his own field differently because of what happened inside his own family.

You leave with: the specific points where women fall out of a care pathway, and what a clinician or an administrator can change immediately, without a budget line or a committee.

Beautifully Unfocused

Building a Life Around the Brain You Actually Have

For: leadership programs, creative teams, neurodiversity and ADHD events

People sometimes look at the books, music, podcast, art and my job at Heritage Health and ask how I keep all of it going.

The answer has changed over the years.

I spent a long time trying to force myself into ways of working that looked more conventional. Eventually I became more interested in understanding when my brain does its best work and building better structures around that. Some of the things I once thought I needed to fix turned out to be connected to the creativity and curiosity behind much of the work I care about.

This talk is about that process. I talk about attention, leadership, creativity, unfinished ideas, productivity systems that collapse after twelve days and the weird experience of having six things happening in your head while somebody is still explaining the first one.

There is room for humor in this conversation because there has to be. There is also a serious question underneath it about how workplaces treat people whose brains do not fit neatly inside the systems we built for them.

You leave with: structures that work with the way an unfocused brain actually behaves, instead of ones that assume it will eventually behave differently.

Human First

Keeping People Visible in What We Build

For: any organization deploying AI, boards, all-hands, leadership offsites

I use artificial intelligence every day. I use it in my creative work, in research and in the strange ongoing experiment of trying to build my own AI assistant.

I have also stood inside a gallery showing AI-assisted artwork while people protested the work outside.

That experience made the questions around AI much more personal for me. I am interested in where these tools help people do better work, what happens when efficiency removes human interaction we did not realize mattered, what creators owe people when AI is part of the process and which decisions deserve to remain firmly in human hands.

I am not interested in giving an AI pep rally. I am much more interested in what happens after everybody gets past the demos and has to decide how they actually want to live and work with these tools.

That is where the Human First conversation begins.

You leave with: a way to decide on purpose what your organization keeps human, before the default decides it for you.