Doug Macnamara

This page restores the biography that Banff Executive Leadership Inc. published for its founder. It records what the archived site itself said, in the past tense, and nothing beyond it. No later career, no awards, no roles and no personal detail have been added, and the contact routes the original carried have been removed.

The practice, from 2001

Doug Macnamara founded Banff Executive Leadership Inc. in 2001 and was described on the site as its President and Chief Executive Officer, and as its lead faculty member. The listing credited him with more than twenty-five years of experience in leadership, governance and executive development, strategic facilitation and organizational development, with particular specialization in strategy formulation and implementation, wilderness and high-risk environments, organizational leadership, branding, and sales, marketing and service development. Within the practice, the areas of expertise recorded against his name were strategic thinking, planning and implementation; market positioning and branding; governance structures and processes; competency profiling; the design of experiential and active learning processes; innovation processes; retreat facilitation; and keynote speaking.

The management education years, 1994 to 2001

From March 1994 until July 2001 Doug Macnamara held a vice-presidency at a residential arts and management institution in Banff, and ran its management education division, leaving in 2001 to set up a private firm. The archived biography attaches unusually specific figures to that period. Annual programming grew from approximately thirty-five offerings to more than one hundred and thirty. Annual participant numbers grew from eight hundred to four thousand.

The same passage credits him with leading the development of dedicated programming areas for Aboriginal Leadership and Management and for Community and Not-for-Profit Leadership, with enhancing the core leadership and management offering, and with re-inventing the governance and executive leadership programming. It also records that he devised the competency profiling and active learning processes the centre used, which is the direct antecedent of the design approach the later practice carried into its own programmes: competency-based research underneath, active learning on top, and participants expected to leave with something applicable rather than something interesting.

Earlier career

The biography sets out a career that arrived at executive development by an indirect route. Doug Macnamara began it a long way from a boardroom. He began as a high school science teacher, then worked as an editor in educational publishing. He spent several years at a trust company, where he was responsible for leading strategic planning, management development and technical training across a demanding technical range that included credit, money markets, pensions, benefits and corporate finance. While there he founded and was managing partner of an internal consulting unit which grew into a national team covering human resources, benefits design, communications and strategic planning, working with large corporations, government departments and non-profit organizations. He later served as Vice President of Sales at a distributor of wiring systems for telecommunications, data, electrical and electronic infrastructure, where the archived text credits him with turning around the sales force and the financial condition of the business.

Across those roles the listing records executive responsibility for new business unit start-ups, for downsizing and turnarounds, and for restructuring and transformation work, including strategic and marketing repositioning and the rebranding of corporate image. As a consultant, it states that he assisted more than fifty organizations through processes of that kind. Both halves of that experience are visible in the practice that followed: the engagement work was built by someone who had been the client as well as the adviser.

Academic background

The site recorded a B.Sc. in Biochemistry, a B.Ed. in Environmental and Adult Education, an Outdoor Educator's Certificate, a Certificate in Employee Benefits, and a human resources professional designation. It is an unusual combination, and it explains a good deal about the practice. A science degree accounts for the insistence on evidence and on models that can be tested against a real board rather than admired. Environmental and adult education, together with the outdoor educator's qualification, account for the experiential use of the mountain setting described in the retreat and keynote work. Employee benefits and human resources account for the willingness to go into the technical machinery of compensation and performance systems, where most leadership consultants stop.

Speaking and facilitation

Doug Macnamara was an active keynote speaker and executive retreat facilitator, and the archived listing names the sessions he was delivering at the time. They covered leading in a networked world and leadership at internet speed; improving board governance effectiveness; strategic planning; market positioning and creating enhanced customer value; competency mapping and performance management systems; differentiating yourself and creating value for your customers; economic trends and environmental scanning; trends in networking and communications; communication to employees in volatile times; unleashing creativity and innovation; merger and acquisition communications; and pension, benefits and incentive compensation design.

That list is a fair index of the range the practice covered, and several of the themes on it became numbered issues of the publication preserved in the Leadership Acumen archive, where the arguments are set out at length rather than in a session title.

Much of the governance ground covered in those sessions is now formalized by director-development bodies such as the Institute of Corporate Directors, while the executive themes continue to recur in the pages of Harvard Business Review.