Asa James Swan on Helping People Become Better Leaders

“Everybody takes their cues from the senior leader. In my mind, that’s the beginning of all leadership training,” Swan says.

Swan speaks at a Rotary Club meeting. Courtesy of Asa James Swan

Asa James Swan became deeply interested in leadership and government in his teens. As a freshman in high school, he ran for class president. At age 15, he started college and a year later became student body president. His parents later told him that they remembered walking and seeing their teenage son glued to the TV and switching between C-SPAN and several news channels during the 1994 midterm elections, and thinking “What is he doing? Why is our teenage son obsessed with these election results?”

Swan has just spent this past year as the Chief Leadership Officer of the Commonwealth of Kentucky—an increasingly popular position in the private sector, but rarely heard of in the public sector.