The NMBA held its 111th Annual Convention at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort on September 14-16. The event was a huge success!
To get things rolling, we had a cocktail reception and vendor event at the Starlight Bowling Alley at the Santa Ana Resort and Casino. Ken Clayton, Western Bank Artesia, organized the event and put on an exhibition against former Artesia High School star bowler Will Davis. Ken won after bowling a 297 game, just three pins shy of a perfect game. Bankers, spouses, sponsors and vendors all bowled or cheered the teams on. It was a great event, with winners receiving cash prizes.
NMBA Past President David Hockmuth opened the general session of the convention with a welcome and the introduction of our first speaker, Reilly White, Ph.D., Anderson School of Management. Professor White discussed the economic outlook for 2024, including insights into the macroeconomics and financial environment that banks can expect in 2024. He concluded with key trends, challenges and opportunities that will shape the banking sector, including changing economic circumstances, technology advances and costs and shifting customer expectations.
Dale Dekker, a well-known businessman and respected architect, gave a rather impassioned plea for the business community to get involved in state and local politics. He pointed out that New Mexico ranks near the bottom in several categories, including crime and corrections, education, the economy, child well-being, health care, infrastructure, opportunity, percentage of persons living in poverty, income growth and population aged 25 and older with a high school diploma or higher. Frankly, with our abundance of natural resources and huge state budget surpluses, there is a real opportunity for the state to significantly improve. Political leaders must spend our resources wisely.
Hugh Carney, Senior Vice President and Attorney with the ABA, addressed the post-Silicon Valley Bank regulatory response. He noted that the bank regulatory agencies have completed their postmortems on recent bank failures. While blame primarily lies with each bank’s failure to adequately manage risk, the regulators’ findings will drive supervisory and regulatory changes for all banks. He discussed regulatory changes for all banks. He discussed the regulatory treatment on unrealized losses, uninsured deposits and the condition of deposit insurance fund. Overall, he predicted that the Silicon Valley Bank failure will have a huge impact on banks and, in particular, in the examination and supervision arena.
For our final dinner event, we were treated to a remarkable and timely guest speaker, Diane Branagan, a highly decorated animal trainer for film and television productions. As Jason Wyatt noted, “Everyone in the 100-plus-person audience was completely focused on her speech, not uttering a word while she spoke.” Her topic was “Everyone is teachable.”
The following are some of the major tidbits she shared in her speech. At the beginning of Diane’s career, 29 years ago, she worked for a company that trained horses, camels, lions, tigers, dogs and cats. That was her introduction to handling animals on film and TV sets. She has been exposed to everything from primates to big cats. Her first film experience was on “Titanic,” where she trained dogs and rats. She still works with dogs and sometimes wolves, but she now primarily trains horses.
Diane said she always keeps in mind that animals have different brains. They can’t talk to you, but they can certainly communicate. She uses the 1% rule: If you can just make it better by 1% each day, at the end of 100 days, you’re significantly better. If they just learn a little bit each day, then after three months of preparation, they’ll have something to present to the camera.
That’s how she learns as well, in little increments. She said it’s about coming in to work every day, learning and pushing herself. And that’s what she does with the actors. She said that there are some actors who have never been around horses, and you can tell that they are fearful and that if a person is afraid of an animal, it reads on film. So, before filming a season of “Yellowstone,” for example, she does a cowboy camp, where she gets the actors working with the horses. She also stated that she would rather work with someone who knows nothing about horses than someone who went on trail rides in the fifth grade. She believes that it’s hard to unlearn bad habits, whereas if they come in with a clean canvas, she can teach them a lot.
Diane also said that any horse trainer will tell you that you have to look where you’re going, not where you’ve been. She teaches that when horses are pulling a wagon, the driver really needs to look ahead on the road, so they can send the horses to that point. If the driver is looking directly down at the horses, there is no guidance for them. She equated it to driving a car while looking at the steering wheel instead of the road.
Diane said that people eventually get it, hence her topic, “Everyone is teachable.” She tells the actors she works with, “What you find difficult today will be your warm-up tomorrow.”
Thanks to all of our sponsors, exhibitors and bankers who participated in the 111th Annual Convention. Next year will be even better! And, finally, I want to thank our Past President, David Hockmuth, for providing the NMBA and me with a great year. David is a true professional.
