Scott Miller - The Leadership Campaign: 10 Political Strategies to Win at Your Career and Propel Your Business to Victory

THE

LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN

SCOTT MILLER AND DAVID MOREY

THE

LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN

10 POLITICAL STRATEGIES TO WIN AT YOUR CAREER AND PROPEL YOUR BUSINESS TO VICTORY

Copyright 2016 by Scott Miller and David Morey

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

T HE L EADERSHIP C AMPAIGN

E DITED BY P ATRICIA K OT

T YPESET BY K ARA K UMPEL

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To Denise, Tyler, and Brett. To the late Steven Jobs and the very lively Mike Murray of Apple Computer for setting us on the insurgent path to leadership.

SM

To Xie Zheng, who helps me be a better leader and person every day. To Sue, the best sister a brother can have. And to our clients, who teach us more than we can ever teach them.

DM

Step 1
DECIDE to Run

Step 2
THINK, PLAN, and ACT Like an Insurgent

Step 3
BUILD Your Kitchen Cabinet

Step 4
PREPARE Your Campaign Inside-Out

Step 5
ANNOUNCE Your Candidacy

Step 6
DEFINE Everything

Step 7
CONTROL the Dialogue

Step 8
GAIN Momentum

Step 9
EXPLOIT Crisis

Step 10
LEADERSHIP, the Campaign

The point of this book is to teach you how to develop the leadership skills needed in a changing and challenging business environment. The principles of leadership we preach are those of successful insurgents and revolutionaries in business, politics, and warfare. In the Information Age in which we all live and work, insurgents hold the advantage over incumbents. The status quo in business leadership that developed over the past hundred years simply no longer cuts it. The tried-and-true has been tried and tried and is no longer true.

So the further premise of this book is that the model of leadership used by most organizations is broken. We need new strategies, different approaches, new training, and new ways of communicating. All of these are aspects of the new leadership, which, it turns out, is not new to us. Back in the 1980s, we called it change leadership in the model we developed for Steven Jobs and Mike Murray at Apple Computer. Today, that term is more relevant than ever. In our work and in our lives, change is in control of the dialogue.

In 2004, we wrote The Underdog Advantage as a primer on the insurgent forces, which were (and still are, even more intensely) disrupting business, politics, and warfare. In ten actionable steps, The Leadership Campaign will show you how to use the insurgent political model as a strategy to succeed in your career and help your project, team, or company succeed in todays complex and competitive markets. This insurgent model is the best path to the change leadership that is required today.

Step by step, well go through the basics of The Leadership Campaign. Youll see that it is laid out just like a political campaign, from beginning through victory party. This is not just an effective metaphor. It is a framework that builds success and gets the win for a group or an individual leader by keeping the entire teams focus lasered-in on results that must be won by its self-defined Election Day.

We offer here the ten fundamental steps in developing successjust as we have experienced it and have seen it in countless political and business campaigns, and for countless candidates, CEOs, and CEOs in the making. Each step is an important element in the development of more focus, energy, and effective strategies and tactics for your company, team, or your own career. So, no skipping!

Maybe were adrenaline junkies. But the White House-or-Outhouse stakes of the political campaign have always had a grip on us. You get 50.1% on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, or you go home. There are a lot of tense nights and a lot of all-nighters working to build that winning .1%. There are a lot of mornings you wake up with that dull ache in the pit of your stomach, with that creeping sense that youre just not going to make it there. You play on a motley team of experts, Big Data nerds, issue wonks, scruffy field organizers, slick ad people, and gruff managers, all of whom share that one commitment: the win, the whole win, and nothing but the win.

The adrenaline rush, the ache, the fear, and the hope are all concentrated into every campaign and often stirred together into any one day. If you cant take that upside-down, loop-dee-loop roller coaster ride, then youre not cut out for politics.

In the mid-1980s, facing off against the towering IBM business juggernaut, Apple Computer was the pesky insurgent versus the seemingly untouchable decades-old incumbent. Steven Jobs had the idea that an insurgent political strategy and its nothing-but-the-win culture might be just what it would take to win.

Back in 1984, we were making a very nice living as political campaign consultants, managing fifteen or twenty U.S. campaigns as well as the campaigns of democratic revolutionaries around the world. Then Jobs invited us to lunch. You guys know something we dont know, he told us. You people do strategy differently than people do in business. You play for all the marblesWhite House or Outhouse. And I think you develop a little sharper plans and sharper elbows than corporate strategists. Id like you to think about our competition with IBM as if it were a political campaign.