Banff

What are you optimizing for over the next 3 years?  Can you explain it in one clean sentence aloud? First to the mirror, then to a friend? We encourage every executive to build (and constantly review and refine) a framework for “what’s next” - whether in role and planning for the future, or in a transition and being purposeful about decisions. Your framework will be iterative, and you should expect it to evolve. There are a series of questions you need to reflect on first.  They are broad and cover many areas: - Identity & Energy  - Wealth & Risk  - Brand & Narrative - Network & Ecosystem  - Alignment to Mandate & Strengths - Timing & Capacity Once you work with those and prioritize your “optimizers”, you can put a plan in place. A key thing to remember - these can change.  What is right now does not have to be right in 3 years, 5 years, maybe 6 months.  This is pencil not pen. Our work at Banff is helping our clients put frameworks for the future in place, and then actually executing against them. We thrive at the intersection of strategy, execution and results.

December is when the next year gets decided. Within Banff, we see the most strategic and high perming leaders, companies and investors take the end of the year: - To recover - To reposition Not with noise or big performances, but with a disciplined plan that creates real progress (to whatever goals they have). The executives who enter January strongest tend to do three things now: - They pressure-test their narrative against where the market is actually moving, not where it was last year - They audit their networks with a critical eye, identifying the the 5-10 relationships that will matter most to their goals - whether that be a big partnership, new investment, next role, board seat, portfolio move - They gather unfiltered market feedback to make sure the story being told about them matches the story they want At the senior level, momentum doesn’t come from working harder in January. It comes from being clearer before the year turns. This is what we do: continuous executive access, trusted feedback loops, and the right introductions at the right time - built around your goals. If you’re a Banff client, we are running these year-end resets with you. If you’re not, and want to enter 2026 with that kind of advantage, reach out to executive-services@banffadvisors.com to start a conversation.

Growing up in Canada, today was always a special day. We wore our poppies, wrote poems and made art remembering and honoring those who served. I remember years ago being in Heathrow at 11am. One of the world’s busiest airports came to a halt for 2 minutes, the bugle playing The Last Post while we all paused to remember. At Banff we are proud to support the amazing men and women who chose to serve their countries, to dedicate their amazing talent, values and passions in service of others. On this day - but every day - we pause to remember, to appreciate, to give thanks. To those in our Banff family and all of those they have served with, lean on us as we have leaned on you for so long.

"Of the 204 senior executive offers we made, 199 left something on the table we were willing to give them" - CHRO, F100 Company Every executive offer has more on the table. Salary, bonus, and title may be the headline items, but the real levers include sign-ons, equity triggers and schedules, decision rights, severance protections, external board participation pre-approval and the influence you carry into the room. Harvard Business Review reports that nearly half of executives underestimate the negotiable elements of a C-suite offer (we believe it's more). The Wall Street Journal found that only 31% of people who changed jobs last year negotiated their offer at all. Our latest client resource, Navigating Offers: There’s Always More on the Table, outlines the dimensions executives should evaluate, from compensation and authority to protection and positioning. At Banff, we guide senior leaders through these negotiations (new jobs as well as current annual reviews) with precision. We map every lever, benchmark against market standards, and prepare you to sequence and frame each ask in ways that maximize value without undermining credibility. Our advisors understand the dynamics in the room and distill what matters most so you leave with an offer that sets the right foundation for impact. If you are a Banff client, this resource is in your inbox. If you are considering whether career management support could strengthen your next transition, reach out to executive-services@banffadvisors.com.

I created a "Team of Rivals" AI board room this weekend and it was fascinating. All part of my daily prompting practice I started after hosting an amazing private Banff AI webinar: "From pilot to scale: learning from a global leader" Last week, Banff members had an incredible chance to sit down and learn from one of the global AI leaders (in this case at a public, highly regulated company).  Many more details behind it all, but what stood out for me (and had me building agents all weekend!): - Building is easy. Deploying is hard. One of their first bots took 11 months to launch — the tech worked on day one, the governance and culture didn’t. - Prompting is the new literacy. A 25-year-old with no business experience can outperform a veteran who hasn’t practiced. A veteran with AI prompting experience is unbeatable. It’s a muscle, not a mindset. Train daily. - Leadership matters more than tools. The best business results correlate with the sophistication of the leaders using AI, creating programs of learning, having champions through the organization, not the models themselves. - Culture beats architecture. You can’t legislate innovation. You can only create room for it — train, test, celebrate wins, scale what works. If you’re leading in a large org, the takeaway to me was simple: stop waiting for perfect models. Start practicing your prompting.

Vegas to the West Village. Fintech to Consumer. What a two days. Thrilled to host Banff's fall Consumer and Consumer Tech leaders private dinner last night with my amazing colleagues Olivia Barth DeNavi and Max Ravech. As always, the ping pong bounced wildly, and with such an amazing group of CEOs, execs, search leaders and investors, the topics were broad and fascinating: - Community as the product. Go deep, don’t think about it in terms of scaling but rather making a product unique and differentiated to your community - Brand and performance marketing continuing to blur - CMOs need to know both, and CEOs need to know what they actually are looking for - Half lives of brands, the frailty of a brand, and the disruption of the luxury market - Investors being open to more short term fix-and-exit leadership tenures and thus more "retired" execs coming off the bench for shorter stints - An AI versus craftsmen conversation leading to this fun (?) fact - 1 in 11 bottles of corked (versus screwtop) wine have gone bad, yet no one wants a sommelier to unscrew their wine at dinner As always, a huge thank you to the wonderful Banff clients and partners who attended and as always, "coming as you are".

We collect insights from all of our meetings, dinners and events to share what is most interesting to us right now in our quarterly Views from Banff which all our members received this morning. Topic covered included: - Data Centers and Energy - “We used to build cities around rivers and railroads. Now we build them around data centers” - Scale versus agility. In this new world can you do more at a company at scale, or at a smaller disruptor? And does being “in the middle” get you stuck in the worst of both worlds?  - The major impact of shifts in FX and global currencies on macro-economics (and politics) - "Blue collar" and "white collar" - where are the jobs, where is the talent, and cautious optimism about a AI-enabled on the ground workforce; and how it all might shake out - Is universal income inevitable (in some countries) in an AGI-driven world? What about those who fall behind? What does that world look like? - Private credit - how big it has gotten, the new players on either side (insurers to data centers), and how the entire ecosystem continues to grow and expand (and get more interconnected) - And the number one topic of conversation by far….the future of education and development: "How will the next generation of leaders learn to lead in a world where AI accelerates output but shortcuts experience?” Banff is grounded on three main pillars of support - Guidance, Connections and Insights. We are thrilled to be on the ride with the amazing executives that call Banff their partner.

Aliens, AI Sommeliers and Chicken Feathers Just another awesome Banff private dinner, this time with incredible leaders from across the consumer and consumer tech sector - public company CEOs to investors, founders and amazing c-suite leaders. As always the ping pong bounced in many directions - topics that stood out for me and Kayla Kanipe - Education, learning and development continues to be at the forefront of everyone's minds. - An interesting angle here was debating the value of an expert versus information. That is, if AI is better at understanding wine, or knowing everything you need to know about economics, do you still trust the Sommelier, the professor more? What is the value of the “master” of a craft? - Scale versus agility. In this new world can you do more at a company at scale, or at a smaller disruptor? And does being “in the middle” get you stuck in the worst of both worlds? One of our CEOs summed it up best - with all that is going on, the ultimate responsibility of leaders is to lead. We know what the playing field is, go lead.