Keynote Speakers

Opening Keynote: Garth Jordan

CEO, Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) & Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA)

That's the share of associations that describe their own value proposition as very compelling. Not to outsiders—to themselves.

The professional association was one of the most elegant organizational inventions in American history. But it was built for a vanished world: one of information scarcity, geographic limitation, and no alternatives. That world is gone. The model remains.

For thirty years, the data has told the same story—flat and declining membership, a dues-to-revenue inversion no one ever voted on, and a sector quietly unconvinced of its own worth. The response has been nearly universal: run the model better. Not differently. Better.

This session argues the model itself is the problem—not because the people running associations are failing, but because the entire professional infrastructure of the sector, its training, its credentialing, its peer communities, is built to execute an inherited architecture rather than question it.

The organizations that have broken through share one discipline: they chose to focus on value. Deliberate, strategic, and sometimes costly—because they gave something up to get there.

Drawing on fifteen years leading and transforming associations across five industries, Garth Jordan presents a methodology that starts with what the profession truly needs and builds through a value-first lens—one that ultimately dictates the business model, instead of the other way around.

Come ready to think about your organization differently.