Portland keynote speaker for corporate, healthcare, and association events.
Chris Sund is a keynote speaker, Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach, and sitting executive who leads national healthcare staffing organizations. He speaks on workforce motivation, leadership, retention, and human potential for Oregon associations, brand and product organizations, health systems, and employers across the Portland metro.
Response within one business day.
This city manufactures belief in human potential and forgets to spend any of it internally.
Portland is the global capital of athletic apparel. Nike is headquartered in Beaverton with roughly fifteen thousand regional employees. Adidas runs its North American headquarters here. Columbia Sportswear has been based here since 1938. Under Armour keeps research and development in the metro, KEEN is here, and behind the household names sit hundreds of smaller firms making technical clothing, footwear and workwear. Oregon leads the country in footwear patents.
Look at what all of those companies actually sell. Not shoes. Every campaign any of them has ever run says the same thing to a customer, which is that you are capable of more than you currently believe. That message is this region’s primary export.
And it is produced by people who rarely receive it. The designer who spent fourteen months on a silhouette that died in a line review. The developer whose name will never appear on anything that ships. The product manager on their fourth reorg in six years. Creative and product work gets judged subjectively by a small number of senior people, most iterations are killed by design, and the credit attaches to a logo rather than to a person. A team can spend a career convincing the world that effort matters while quietly concluding that theirs does not.
That is not a morale problem to be solved with a poster in the atrium, and this room will spot a poster instantly. It is a specific leadership habit. Naming what a person contributed when the project itself did not survive. Separating the judgment of the work from the judgment of the worker, out loud, so that a killed concept does not read as a verdict on a career.
It is the same story on the other side of the metro. Intel is Oregon’s largest private employer with better than twenty two thousand people in Hillsboro, working on development cycles where most of what you build never reaches a customer. OHSU, Providence, Legacy and Kaiser employ tens of thousands more in work where the outcome is often outside anyone’s control.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado. His book is called You Are Capable of More, which in this city needs pointing inward rather than outward.
Operator, Not Consultant
President and COO of national healthcare staffing organizations, still making the hiring and retention calls he speaks about.
Not a Poster
Material aimed at leaders and specific behaviors rather than slogans, which is the only register a brand and design audience will accept.
Corporate and Clinical
Works for a brand all-hands, a semiconductor site meeting, or a hospital leadership day.
Groups Chris speaks for.
Greater Portland runs a workforce above 1.3 million across apparel and outdoor brands, semiconductors, healthcare, and manufacturing.
- Athletic and outdoor brands including Nike, Adidas America, Columbia Sportswear, Under Armour’s regional operations, and KEEN, along with the technical apparel and footwear community, for all-hands gatherings and leadership summits
- Providence Health & Services with a regional workforce above twenty thousand, OHSU with roughly eighteen to nineteen thousand as the largest employer within Portland proper, plus Legacy Health and Kaiser Permanente Northwest
- Intel, Oregon’s largest private employer with better than twenty two thousand people across its Hillsboro campuses, and the Silicon Forest supply chain
- Manufacturing employers including Daimler Trucks North America, Precision Castparts, and Greenbrier
- Oregon statewide associations in hospital, long-term care, municipal, and education sectors, many of which meet in Portland rather than the capital
- Portland State University, Reed, Lewis and Clark, and metro school districts
- Port of Portland, financial services, and the clean energy sector
Portland employers with the same gap.
Healthcare is where Chris operates, but work that mostly does not ship is the shared condition here.
Brand, Design, and Product
Teams whose best work is often killed upstream and whose credit attaches to a logo rather than a name.
Semiconductor and Technology
Development organizations on long cycles where most of what gets built never reaches a customer.
Healthcare
Clinical and support teams doing everything right in situations where the outcome is not theirs to decide.
Manufacturing
Plants and suppliers where skilled work is invisible until something goes wrong.
Portland and metro venues.
- The Oregon Convention Center and downtown hotel ballrooms for statewide and national association meetings
- Corporate campuses in Beaverton, Hillsboro, Tigard, and Tualatin for all-hands and leadership summits
- OHSU, Providence, Legacy, and Kaiser campuses for nurse leadership and all-staff days
- Portland State University and regional colleges for campus and staff programming
- Manufacturing and distribution sites for shift-repeated crew sessions
- Lake Oswego, Vancouver, and the Silicon Forest corridor, with Salem and Eugene for organizations that rotate their meeting location
Portland events Chris speaks at.
Corporate and Brand All-Hands
Company gatherings, leadership summits, and kickoffs for brand, product, and technology organizations.
Association Conferences
Statewide and national association annual meetings and general sessions, the format Chris works in most often.
Hospital and Health System Events
Leadership days, nurse recognition events, and all-staff meetings.
Retention and Frontline Leadership
Supervisor development for teams whose work is often invisible or discontinued.
Long-Term and Senior Care
Skilled nursing, assisted living, and continuing care conferences and in-service days.
HR and SHRM Chapter Events
Human resources conferences and chapter meetings on recognition and retention in project-based work.
Keynote topics for your Portland event.
Every session is customized for the audience, the format, and what you are actually trying to change.
See what conference organizers and HR leaders have said after booking Chris.
Booking a keynote speaker in Portland
Has Chris spoken in Oregon before?
Does Chris travel to Portland?
Our audience works in brand and design. They will be skeptical of a motivational speaker.
Most of what our teams build never ships. Can that be addressed directly?
Can Chris speak to a corporate audience rather than a healthcare one?
What does a Portland keynote cost?
Can Chris speak virtually to an Oregon audience?
Bring Chris to your Portland event.
Send your date, location, and audience. You will get availability and a quote back within one business day.
info@chrissund.com · 402-212-5771 · Oregon speaking · All locations