Everyone, from the lowest campaign worker to the candidate understands what they must do to win. To achieve or maintain the leadership position in your industry every employee, like a political candidate, must focus on winning every day.

In business, the advantage often goes to the underdog as is demonstrated by once insurgent companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines. In this globally competitive environment, even if you’re the incumbent, you have to compete like an insurgent to stay ahead.

The greatest danger to a company comes not with failure, but with success. Insurgents break the rules and blindside incumbents that are basking in their achievements. It doesn’t matter if you’re IBM blindsided by Dell or the corner baker decimated by Krispy Kream.

Whether you’re large or small, the incumbent or the insurgent, it’s only by behaving like a winning politician that you can sustain success today. You can’t sit back and let it happen. Embrace change, take control and make it happen.

Political campaigns teach their people how to think about the challenges they must overcome to win on Election Day. What challenges do your people need to overcome that will make or break your business? Focus your people on those challenges and establish a deadline by which they must be overcome.

By playing to win like a politician and establishing a deadline like Election Day you will energize your people and the work they do. Polls tell politicians how they’re doing along the way and you need a system for tracking progress too.

Whether large and established or new on the scene, as an insurgent competitor, you need to tell a great story about what your future will look like. In the 1980s, although impossible for most people to imagine, Bill Gates said there would be a computer in every home. His inspiring message promised employees that they would make their customers’ lives better.

Winning candidates know that before they can move voters, they must move the people who work for them. In business, your employees are responsible for delivering on your promise to your customers. That means that every member of your organization must be committed to your strategy.

To win elections, politicians segment voters, work on those who can be persuaded and abandon the rest. Who is critical to your winning? Consider employees, targeted and current customers, distributors, investors, analysts, activists, regulators, journalists, and boards of directors.

In elections the insurgent challenger is always about change and how that will make life better for the electorate. To keep an insurgent mentality, even if you’re the seasoned incumbent, make your company about choice and change. Define how winning will change and benefit your customers, the company and its employees.

By using these principles, you can ensure that your company, no matter how large or small, will harness the energy of a winning political campaign, attack the competition, seize opportunities, and win market share.

P.S. Speaking of politics, don’t forget to vote on November 8th!

If you enjoyed this column you’ll love our Books (click here) and Training Programs (click here). Each is filled with hundreds of leading edge profit enhancing ideas from the best business thinkers in the world. This is one of over 300 columns published and part of the reason why The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have called The DreamSpeaker™ about Business Planning Issues.