Philip Blumel: Private sector term limits. Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement, published on June 2nd, 2025.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: I was hoping to have another victory to proclaim with this episode, but the vote on the term limits convention resolution was postponed in Arizona last week, and we’ll have to wait a few more weeks. Maybe Arizona will be the 13th state to officially call for congressional term limits. We’ll see. But for now, rather than go into the weeds with all the political back and forth, I want to go a different direction with this podcast and talk a little bit about private sector term limits. Now, the purpose of this podcast, of course, is to advocate for term limits on the public sector, on politicians. Ideally, we as voters are the employers of our public officials and it’s our job to set the terms of their employment to best serve the interests of the public as a whole. It is clear how term limits do this by encouraging competitive elections, by politely sending off our most senior politicians who don’t know it’s time to retire, by inviting new faces and ideas into the political process, by severing the relationships between entrenched politicians and lobbyists, by improving transparency. Oh, we talk about this every week. Basically, we recognize the frailties of human beings in the unique situation of wielding power, and we want to incorporate protections for the people into our laws. But incentive issues also pop up in other areas of life, and without all the sound and fury of politics, term limits are often offered as a solution. I’ll give you a few examples. First, we’ll hear from Libby Utter from Club E. Club E is a network of entrepreneurial professionals in the Twin Cities area. In this clip, she talks about having explicit term limits set on board members at a growing business.
Speaker 3: How about board term limits? What do you think?
Libby Utter: I’m passionate about this. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Board term limits, I think, are very important. This is just my point of view. I think they’re very important. They give you an on-ramp and an off-ramp, and the off-ramp, as we talked about, is difficult. And if you have a time frame where you have an off-ramp, it’s a much more graceful exit of an underperforming board member. So I highly, highly recommend it. I also think that term limits give people clarity that they have a point in time to contribute to the business. And boards get stale. And if you have term limits and you stagger them appropriately, your board should not get stale.
Philip Blumel: Interesting. For more info on Club E, go to www.brimacomb.com. That’s B-R-I-M-A-C-O-M-B.com. Now, Libby was talking about smaller businesses and is speaking to entrepreneurs about their boards of directors. I was very surprised by this next example that deals with CEOs, the chief executives, of larger S&P 500-level businesses. At that level, the competition is so fierce, and without any need for codified term limits, the average tenure of CEOs tends to be well under eight years. Nonetheless, in this clip titled, Should CEOs Have Term Limits?, on YouTube’s We Study Billionaires channel, the answer appears to be yes. At least, according to Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, who took that company from $1.1 billion to $60 billion in his decade at the helm. George was also CEO of Honeywell and Lytton Industries, and since then has been a professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches leadership training and wrote his book, True North: Leading Authentically in Today’s Workplace. Let’s hear it from him.
Speaker 5: You set a 10-year term for your role as CEO at Medtronic, which I found very, very interesting because, you know, over 10 years, you learn a lot. I’m sure with that level of success as well, going from, you know, $1billion to $60 billion, you probably are feeling like you’ve got a lot of momentum. There’s things you maybe still want to do. So how did you decide to set a limit at 10 years, and do you think this should be a standard policy for most companies?
Bill George: I had studied a lot of leaders who had stayed 13, 14, 15, 16. They always did less well than they did in the first 10. First 10, they did better. I think high-tech companies that come from need new creative leadership every decade, and things change. You know, you have a great leader in health care at Mayo in the last 10 years, but we need a new leader that can figure out what’s going to happen in the next 10. So I believe in this new leadership. Also, when you have a new leader, you open up opportunities for everyone else. Otherwise, you tend to keep people around you’ve had, and young people don’t have a shot. So now that’s on the professional side. On the personal side, you only go around once in life. And so I figured I want to see what else I can do. I didn’t know I was going to become a teacher or a writer. And, you know, the last thing I thought I was going to become an author. And, you know, but you do this and you say, that’s the way I want to fulfill. My goal is to, as I said earlier, help the people reach their full potential.
Philip Blumel: In the world of nonprofits, the need for term limits is firmly established and not controversial at all. Here’s Tiffany Allen from the Boss on a Budget YouTube channel, a coach who assists people in launching nonprofit organizations. Much like Libby Utter talking about starting businesses, Tiffany Allen is adamant that you’re going to want a term limited board of directors.
Tiffany Allen: I help new and small nonprofits get up and running. If you need help with your nonprofit, be sure to subscribe to my channel. I drop a video every single week. So first, let’s talk about term limits, and we should really have a real conversation about why you should have term limits for your board and why it’s not recommended that you have unlimited terms. So an unlimited term means that a person can serve on your board forever, right? And it’s just like the Supreme Court. They can serve as long as they want until they die, or until they roll off and they decide to roll off. And there are a couple reasons why I just don’t recommend that. The first one is, what happens if you get a toxic board member or just an ineffective board member? How can you get that person out? There’s no protocol or system or process in place to let them roll off. So when you have that, that’s the risk that you run when you don’t set any term limits or any boundaries to serving on your board. The second thing is, you really want a board to kind of help with strategy. So you need every once in a while, fresh perspectives, and you also need new networks. You need access to new people who can provide new opportunities, new partnerships. They can connect you to people that they know that you wouldn’t have had access to if they weren’t serving on the board. And if you’re just relying on the same people, especially if you have a small board, you’re going to tap out at some point. And you want to be able to keep it fresh and new and be able to kind of go down different ways or think about your services differently or how you’re running your organization differently that you may not have thought about if you just have the same people who have the same mindset on your board.
Philip Blumel: Here’s another. The PTO Answers channel on YouTube coaches PTO and PTA members, that is Parent Teacher Organizations, and suggests that to avoid burnout and boost fresh membership, you got to have term limits.
Speaker 8: The healthiest PTOs have more generalists who kind of know a little or a lot about many things versus specialists who only know about one thing. It is also very healthy for different people to be in different positions. Like you don’t want the same person being president for, I would say, more than two years. Anything more than that is, I think, personally detrimental to the president. I have been president for longer than two years, and that third year was not fun, was not good, and I needed a big old break from that group. You get burnt out, and it also deprives the group of having new leaders be trained and come up through the ranks into that position. So definitely have term limits.
Philip Blumel: I have another clip here regarding HOAs, where once again, term limits improve incentives and make the process run smoother. But I think you get the point. I should say explicitly that US Term Limits is not advocating codifying any private sector term limits into law. Market participants experiment, they find their own way, and they’re judged by consumers. There’s a feedback loop that is not existent in politics. But it is interesting that many of the insights that have fueled the term limits movement have emerged originally to solve problems in the real world, and they successfully do so. Keep up the good work.
Stacey Selleck: Like the show? You can help by subscribing and leaving a five-star review on both Apple and Spotify. It’s free.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. The Term Limits Convention bills are moving through the state legislatures. This could be a breakthrough year for the term limits movement. To check on the status of the Term Limits Convention resolution in your state, go to termlimits.com/takeaction. There, you will see if it has been introduced and where it stands in the committee process on its way to the floor vote. If there’s action to take, you’ll see a Take Action button by your state. Click it. This will give you the opportunity to send a message to the most relevant legislators, urging them to support the legislation. They have to know you’re watching. That’s termlimits.com/takeaction. If your state has already passed the Term Limits Convention resolution, or the bills have not been introduced in your state, you can still help. Please consider making a contribution to U.S. Term Limits. It is our aim to hit the reset button on the U.S. Congress, and you can help. Go to termlimits.com/donate, termlimits.com/donate. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
Stacey Selleck: Find us on most social media at U.S. Term Limits. Like us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and now LinkedIn.
Speaker 9: USTL.