Vision and Mission

Of everything the practice published about itself, this page is the most useful, because it is the only place where it committed to a definition of its own terms. What follows restores the vision, the mission, the three tenets and the critical success factors close to the wording the site carried. It is reproduced here as a statement of intent that the practice held while it was trading, not as a current one.

Vision

Banff Executive Leadership Inc. would be, and would be recognized to be, one of the leading partners in Canada for practical solutions in governance and executive development, strategic facilitation, keynote speaking and media publication.

Two things in that sentence are worth noticing. The first is the word practical, which the practice used as a boundary rather than a compliment: the test applied to its own material was whether a director could act on it at the next meeting. The second is that publication is listed as a line of work in its own right, on equal footing with facilitation and speaking. That is unusual for a consultancy, and it is the reason the Leadership Acumen library exists at the scale it does. It also signals something structural: the practice treated governance and executive leadership as two halves of one problem rather than as two products.

Mission

The mission was to enable and support fundamental transformation in individuals, organizations and communities by building governance and executive leadership competencies. In practice that split three ways.

With boards, the work was developing improved processes, by-laws, and an understanding of the important work of governance as distinct from operational work. That distinction is the hinge on which the whole board governance practice turned, and most of the dysfunction the practice was called in to address traced back to a board that had quietly become a management committee, or to a management team quietly governing itself. Alongside that sat customized retreats and training, and coaching guidance for the board chair and other board members.

With senior executives and executive teams, the work was developing improved strategic and people-mobilization practices. The practice would coach executive team members looking to develop themselves in short bursts, but always toward an extended commitment of improvement rather than a single intervention. It also facilitated strategic processes and decision-making, on site or in strategic retreats. That side of the work is set out under executive leadership development.

Three tenets

The three words that appeared beneath the wordmark on every page were defined, and the definitions are worth having in full.

Leadership

Holistic, strategic, collaborative, ethical and applied practices of leading both people and communities toward new and sustainable future states. Each adjective is doing work. Holistic and strategic rule out leadership treated as a set of interpersonal techniques. Collaborative and ethical rule out the heroic-individual model that much of the leadership literature of the period still assumed. Applied rules out theory that cannot survive contact with a real agenda. And the object of the sentence is both people and communities, which is a wider claim than most leadership definitions make.

Innovation

Building the environments to foster new ideas, products and services that break through paradox, help us solve complex challenges, capture our imagination, and truly create new value. Note that the leader's job here is environmental rather than creative. The practice did not treat innovation as something a senior person supplies; it treated it as something a senior person makes possible or, far more often, accidentally prevents.

Stewardship

The higher calling for trustees and senior leaders to actively consider, look after and safeguard the well-being of community, environment and biodiversity which they use and impact. This is the most demanding of the three, and the practice knew it: it is an obligation owed to parties who are not in the room, cannot vote and in many cases do not yet exist. Leadership Acumen returned to it repeatedly.

Critical success factors

The same page set out what the practice held itself to.

• The ability to impact and transform organizations, communities and society through the development of individual leadership competency, and through processes that support transformation.
• Financial profitability and sustainable practices.
• Clear brand recognition in Canada and in selected international markets.
• Development of a referral network and of global partnerships with innovation leaders and facilitators.
• Active research and publishing around applied leadership.

That last line is the thread that leads everywhere else in this archive. A practice that writes research and publishing into its own success criteria is committing to produce material whether or not it sells anything, and to be judged on it. It was honoured: the resulting publication ran for the better part of sixteen years, and it is the part of the practice with the longest reach. Everything else preserved here, from the programme descriptions to the article library, is downstream of that decision to treat governance and executive leadership as a field to be researched rather than a service to be sold. An orientation to the rest of the archive sets out where the remainder sits.

The stewardship tenet in particular has since become mainstream language. It runs through the World Bank governance programme in the public sector, and through the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance in the corporate one.