1. Scott Miller – Core Strategy Group 1
They tell you to act like a leader.
Don’t listen.
You hear it all the time. “Act like a leader.” It’s your boss
reading this off a script at the annual sales meeting, trying to
encourage you in your performance review, or raising a glass
of cheap prosecco in a rambling toast at the holiday party,
recounting the greatest advice they ever got. Okay, it’s your
boss, but your boss is probably wrong. Still, bosses keep
advising it year after year and generation after generation. And
that’s why we’ve got boatloads of bosses in business, but very,
very few leaders.
The problem is the traditional model for leadership training in
business, politics, sports and the military is obsolete and
ineffective. The model is broken. Why do so many businesses
act like, quack like, but fail to perform like their market’s
leader? Why do so many organizations fail to create real value
through relevant differentiation? Why do most markets flooded
with a sea of sameness in choices? And why are so many
careers stuck in analog in a digital world? It’s about
leadership. Sure, the old model is the “tried and true.” Well,
it’s been tried, and it isn’t true anymore.
My company at the time, Flying Fortress with the incredible
Pat Caddell, developed a model of leadership working with
Steven Jobs and Mike Murray of Apple in 1984–5. We were
known as Sawyer/Miller Group in politics, and we had been
surfing the worldwide information revolution that begat a
worldwide democratic revolution. Sawyer/Miller had done and
would continue to do a series of global campaigns of
insurgents against entrenched (often autocratic) incumbents:
Corazon Aquino, Kim Dae Jung, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel,
Vicente Fox, Mario Vargas Lhosa, Shehu Shagari and others.

2. Scott Miller – Core Strategy Group 2
The force of that revolution was powerful. The campaigns were
all but unlosable, but provided great learning. Mike Murray
called Caddell and me. “We’d like to have lunch with you
guys.”
We met over shoots and greens at a little place near the new
Macintosh offices. Those unremarkable, crowded offices were
in a failing strip mall in Cupertino, the polar opposite of the
multi-billion dollar Starship Apple that is being built now.
“You guys understand something that we just don’t get,” Steve
said.
Caddell and I were smart enough to keep mulching the shoots
and greens and listened to what he had to say next. “You do
political campaigns. If you don’t get 50.1%, you go home. I
figure you’ve got sharper strategies and sharper elbows than
we do in business. Besides, you guys are always the
insurgents against the incumbents. That’s us.”
Like the best entrepreneurs, Steven had a strong current of
paranoia coursing through his veins. His nemisis Bill Gates
had used the old New York canard to describe it: “Just
because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get
you.”
Job had left Apple and opened the Macintosh offices when
Apple was still considered an interesting little company that
had probably exceeded its “sell-by” date by a few years.
Thanks to Steven, Apple II computers were in elementary
schools all over the U.S. (and some still are in my home state
of Georgia). But he knew that personal computing was on its
way to business, big time. That’s where IBM lived and
dominated the world. Moving into that market would mean
confronting Big Blue.
If you’re under forty years old, you may not even remember
the IBM personal computer. Jobs and Murray and their
Macintosh team (with a little help from Gates and Microsoft)
defeated them. Mike developed the terrific Macintosh

3. Scott Miller – Core Strategy Group 3
marketing in those days, including the greatest TV commercial
in the history of advertising with Lee Clow of Chiat/Day,
“1984.”
Jobs wanted us to create a model of an insurgent versus
incumbent political campaign adapted for business, for the
Mac versus IBM campaign. The basic model we called Change-
Leadership versus Bigness-Leadership. Like any insurgent
campaign, it was a campaign of contrasts:
 Bigness-Leaders worship size and scope and number-
oneness.
 Change-Leaders value speed and mobility over size. They
don’t want to dominate the market, they want to
fundamentally change it. Bill Gates’ vision at Microsoft at
the same time wasn’t to be number one in operating
system software. He wrote it himself: “A computer on
every desk, in every home.” Yes, Microsoft didn’t make
computers at the time. He was talking about the vision of
the bigger revolution, the PC Revolution, that Microsoft
helped lead.
 Bigness-Leaders are heritage driven. They use past
successes to guide their strategies today and tomorrow.
When the brash young Douglas MacArthur took over the
United States Military Academy in 1932, he said, “The
problem here is we keep teaching our cadets to win the
War of 1812.”
 Change-Leaders are vision driven. They pick up the
track behind them and lay it out in front of the engine
toward that idea of a new and better and different future.
 Bigness-Leaders love the comfort of bureaucracy and the
cushion of several layers of org chart below their corner
office.
 Change-Leaders get comfortable with discomfort. They
are informal and most often heretical.
 The central contrast between Bigness-Leaders and
Change-Leaders is the idea of change. Bigness-Leaders
hate it and resist it. Change means threat to them.
Change-Leaders love it. Change means opportunity.

4. Scott Miller – Core Strategy Group 4
Doing that model for Steven and Mike was super fun. It has
also been super successful, and over the years as Flying
Fortress, Sawyer/Miller and Core Strategy Group, we’ve gotten
to apply it with some super interesting change-leaders: Bill
Gates, Michael Milken, Geraldine Ferarro, David Wolfe, Mike
Roberts, Tom Phillips, Sergio Zyman, Pat Moynihan, Joanna
and Jon Jacobson, Rupert Murdoch, Pat Mulhearn, Walter
Buckley, Gordon Eubanks, Alex Gorsky and many others.
This list includes leaders of a lot of big companies (true, some
of them were small at the time; and all were going through
transformation of one kind or another) that have learned at
least for a time to think, plan and act like insurgents, not
incumbents. We’ve worked with plenty of start-ups and
upstarts, too. Even many of them think, plan and act like
Bigness-Leaders. They act like incumbents even though they
haven’t achieved incumbency. That’s why eight out of ten
start-ups never quite get started.
Chances are, when your boss tells you to act like a leader,
they’re telling you to act like a Bigness-Leader. They mean,
“Act the way I did on my way to being boss.” After all, that’s
how their boss acted. That how the boss before their boss
acted and succeeded and got the Tesla and the condo on
Hilton Head.
Don’t do it. Don’t be a boss. We’ve got too many of them
already. Be a leader:
1. Define a future that is better and different because of you
and your team.
2. Define a win that doesn’t just disrupt the markets, but
also changes them forever.
3. Learn to manage resources like a miserly start-up.

5. Scott Miller – Core Strategy Group 5
4. Learn to focus on the “votes” you need to win the election
and change the world; and never break your pick on the
impossible.
5. Learn to be a great communicator; that’s about 75% of
the definition of a great leader.
6. Learn to communicate, coach and motivate inside/out.
Yep, preach to the choir.
7. Learn to pick up the fruit off the ground before the low-
hanging fruit to create the magic of momentum.
8. Learn to love change and teach your organization to love
it. If you lose control of the market dialogue, use change
to regain it.
9. Never play by the rules established by the market leader,
and never, ever play defense. That probably means that
you should respect your boss, but not necessarily follow
their lead.
I could go on and on. We’ve learned from the best of the
world’s business and political insurgents. That’s why David
Morey and I wrote “The Underdog Advantage” back in ’08, and
now “The Leadership Campaign,” coming out this spring
during presidential primary season. The leadership model is
broken, and we want to fix it, one leader and one organization
at a time. That’s the best way to change the world. And that’s
what we hope you’re going to do.