Overview of the Archive

The original site carried a page at this address called Executive Overview and Tour. It was a thin hub: five links, to Overview, Our Team, Mission and Vision, Learning Environment, and Our Work, and almost nothing else. What follows keeps that job and does it properly, as an orientation to what has been preserved here and how the practice it records was put together.

Where the practice came from

Banff Executive Leadership Inc. was established in 2001 in Banff, Alberta. It began with its founder, Doug Macnamara, who had spent the seven years to 2001 running a residential management education division in the same town before leaving to set up a private firm. The new practice carried across the same subject matter, the same senior audience and the same conviction that the mountain setting was a working part of the learning environment rather than a backdrop for it.

How the practice was structured

It was small at the centre and wide at the edge. The core was a handful of people: a president and lead faculty member, a programmes manager responsible for learning material, environment and logistics, and a personal learning advisor who handled participant needs assessment and helped senior people choose the right programme. Everything beyond that core was drawn from a standing network of faculty associates, assembled per engagement rather than carried as payroll. The note on the associate network explains why that structure suited work at this level and what the archive does and does not reproduce about the people in it.

What the sections of this archive contain

• Vision and mission. The practice's own framing of what it existed to do, restored close to its published wording, together with the three tenets and the critical success factors it set itself. See the vision and mission page.
• Board Governance. The larger of the two service pillars: the real work of governance, the distinction between governing and managing, models of governance, and board effectiveness evaluation.
• Executive Leadership Development. Work with vice presidents, general managers, deputy ministers and heads of organizations on strategy, collaborative leadership, creativity and innovation, government relations and complex change.
• Programmes, retreats and coaching. The delivery formats: public and customized programmes, strategic retreat facilitation and keynote sessions, and coaching for board chairs, board members and executive team members.
• Our Work. The shape of the engagements and the sectors they were run in, described generically. The client names the original published are not reproduced.
• Leadership Acumen. The publication, and the largest part of what is worth preserving here.

The learning environment

The original site gave the learning environment a page of its own, and the idea deserves to survive the consolidation. Three things defined that learning environment. First, the cohorts were small and uniformly senior, so that nobody had to translate downward and nobody had to perform; peer networking among people carrying comparable accountability was as much of the value as the curriculum. Second, the design was active rather than expository. Programmes were built on competency-based research and active learning processes, on the principle that participants should leave with tools, models and insight applicable to their own circumstances immediately, not with a binder. Third, the mountain setting was used experientially. The natural environment around Banff was worked into sessions to develop empowerment, teamwork, collaboration and problem solving, and local artists were engaged to help develop creativity and innovation in a group of people whose careers had rewarded analysis far more than imagination. The same thinking shaped the retreat and keynote sessions the practice ran.

Three generations of the site

Anyone following an old link into this domain is following one of three distinct filing systems, and the restoration preserves all three. The first generation, from 2001 to about 2003, used title-case and underscored file names at the root. The second, roughly 2003 to 2008, added lowercase single-word pages for the associate listings and introduced a Newsletter04 directory holding both the HTML issues of Leadership Acumen and a growing library of article PDFs. The third, from about 2009 onward, re-filed that library again under an AcumenPDF directory split into governance articles and leadership articles, which is why several of the best-known pieces exist at two or three different addresses. Where an original address is reclaimed here, it keeps its original spelling and capitalization exactly; where an article has been rebuilt as a readable page, the old PDF addresses point at it.

The site itself stopped changing in August 2018 and stayed byte-for-byte identical for five years before the domain lapsed. This archive treats that as the practice's closing state, and presents it as a record rather than as an offer.

Two points of external context may help. The setting is documented by Parks Canada in its guide to Banff National Park, and the director-development field this practice worked in is now served in Canada largely by bodies such as the Institute of Corporate Directors.