Banff Executive Leadership Inc.

This site is the preserved archive of Banff Executive Leadership Inc., a governance and executive leadership practice that worked out of Banff, Alberta from 2001, and of Leadership Acumen, the practitioner publication it produced for the better part of two decades. Nothing here is an offer of services. The programmes, retreats and advisory engagements described on these pages are written in the past tense because that is what they are: a record of work that was done, kept alongside the writing that came out of it.

The practice introduced itself plainly, and the sentence it opened with is worth restoring more or less as it stood. It specialized in the development and facilitation of learning experiences for those who were truly senior leaders. Directors of boards, and those who were already vice presidents, general managers and heads of organizations, have developmental needs, demands, contexts for their learning approaches and peer networking expectations unlike those of anyone else in an organization. The whole practice was built on that single observation. Programmes and other initiatives were delivered in Banff, across Canada, and internationally.

Who the work was for

This was never a general management training business, and the original site said so repeatedly. The audience was directors and chairs of boards, deputy ministers, vice presidents, general managers and heads of organizations, and explicitly not emerging or middle managers. The distinction mattered because the problems change character at that level. A middle manager is handed a task and judged on execution. A director is handed a mandate, a fiduciary duty and an unbounded set of things that might go wrong, and is judged on whether the organization was well governed. Very little of the training available to the first group is of any use to the second, and Banff Executive Leadership existed to serve the second.

Boards of every form fell inside that scope: corporate boards, charitable and not-for-profit boards, health and education boards, municipal and civic councils and commissions, professional association boards, private and family-owned business boards, Indigenous councils, pension and marketing boards, and the partnership boards of consulting and law firms. The forms differ enormously. The requirements of good governance turn out not to.

Two pillars

The practice organized itself around two bodies of work, and kept them distinct. Board Governance addressed the real work of governance: the difference between governing and managing, the models a board can adopt and blend, the policies and by-laws that give a board something to govern with, and the uncomfortable business of evaluating a board's own effectiveness. Executive Leadership Development addressed the other side of the table: strategy formation and mobilization at the executive level, collaborative and network leadership, creativity and innovation leadership, working with government, and leading complex change.

Around those two pillars sat the delivery formats: public and customized programmes, strategic retreat facilitation, keynote sessions, and coaching for board chairs, board members and executive team members.

Leadership Acumen, and why it is the heart of this archive

Most consulting practices publish brochures. This one published a journal. Leadership Acumen ran from roughly 2002 to 2018, issued at something close to a bi-monthly rhythm, and reached more than thirty-five numbered issues split between governance articles and leadership articles. The issues were not marketing. They were long, argued, framework-heavy pieces on the questions a board or an executive team actually gets stuck on: what transparency obliges you to disclose and what it does not, how to tell a rules-based governance response from a principles-based one, what stewardship asks of a trustee, why decision quality degrades at the top of an organization, and how leadership works when authority is distributed across a network rather than a hierarchy.

That library is the reason this domain was worth restoring. It is cited, linked and quoted far more widely than any description of the practice ever was, and the Leadership Acumen archive is where the substance of this site now lives. The arguments in those pieces are written in the present tense, because they are still arguments. It is the business that is finished, not the thinking.

Banff, and why the setting was part of the method

The practice could have been run from any city, and deliberately was not. Senior work benefits from removal. A board that meets in its own boardroom governs in the shadow of its own habits; the same board three time zones from its head office, in a small cohort, in a place where the scenery does not care about the agenda, argues differently. The Canadian Rockies setting was used experientially rather than decoratively: the mountain environment was worked into the design of sessions to develop empowerment, teamwork, collaboration and problem solving, and local artists were engaged to help open up creativity and innovation in people who had spent twenty years being rewarded for analysis.

Leadership, Innovation, Stewardship

Three words appeared under the wordmark on every page of the original site, and they were not decoration either. Each had a definition the practice committed to in writing, set out in full on the vision and mission page.

• Leadership was defined as the holistic, strategic, collaborative, ethical and applied practice of leading both people and communities toward new and sustainable future states.
• Innovation meant building the environments in which new ideas, products and services can break through paradox, resolve genuinely complex challenges, capture the imagination and create real value.
• Stewardship was framed as the higher calling of trustees and senior leaders to consider, look after and safeguard the well-being of the community, the environment and the biodiversity they use and affect.

What this archive leaves out

A restoration is not a resurrection. Everything transactional in the original has been dropped: the telephone number that sat in the site header, the mailing addresses, the enquiry routes, tuition and accommodation figures, programme dates and the registration form. The client list the practice once published has been left out as well, because those are other organizations' names to use. What remains is the record of what Banff Executive Leadership was, the frameworks it taught, and the writing it gave away.

Readers who come to this archive for the governance material rather than the history will find the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance the closest contemporary statement of the ground this practice worked over. The setting itself is documented by Parks Canada in its guide to Banff National Park.