Leadership Guru John Maxwell's Dream Presidential Candidate Would Owe 'No One Anything,' Stay One Term (Interview 1/2)
NEW YORK — Leadership expert John Maxwell has a dream. He dreams America's next president would have no strings attached except to the American people and would only be in the White House for a single term. "Wouldn't it be refreshing," he says.
Maxwell who has trained more than five million leaders across the world through his EQUIP organization since 2013, thinks perhaps this time around the candidates vying for the seat in the Oval Office in 2016 would be driven less by ambition than a desire to serve.
"I think the problem is too many of them are in the race for themselves. I think the problem is that we don't have servant leaders. I think we have people who are ambitious. That we have people who want power and we have people who want fame, and I think that those are all wrong pursuits of a person that wants to be a leader," he says.
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"I think all the candidates have some very good traits but I think the Achilles heel for most of the candidates is that they truly do not live beyond their own ambition. I would love for example, wouldn't it be refreshing, for a presidential candidate to say 'I'm only going to run for one term. I'm not gonna be a two-term president'?" suggests Maxwell.
And thus began Maxwell's dream.
We are sitting in a conference room in the fourth floor office of Krupp Kommunications in the Flatiron District in Manhattan shortly after 2 p.m. on Wednesday when Maxwell begins sharing his presidential dream candidate in a segue from a discussion of his latest book released a day earlier called Intentional Living: Choosing a Life That Matters.
It is a special book for Maxwell because it's the first time he has gone outside of his leadership niche to address everybody.
"With this book, Intentional Living, my anticipation with this is higher than any book I've ever written. And the reason for that is, this is not a leadership book, this is a book for every person which basically says 'you can have a life of significance but you have to be intentional in it.' And I think that is going to stimulate a lot of people. A lot of people are going to go to a significant level just because they find out how to do it," he explains.
