Guerrilla Warfare Tutorial

Rick Bennett 

Novelist, Guerrilla Warfare Hired Gun, Lecturer

November 4, 2025

To give credit where credit is due, I learned guerrilla warfare from the late Tony Schwartz, with whom I worked to pass Massachusetts' tax-limitation initiative back in 1980. Tony created the famous Daisy ad that ran only one time on one network and destroyed Barry Goldwater's 1966 race for the presidency (see the ad here).

Whenever I've put on a seminar or dealt with high-tech clients, I've gone in with guns blazing and channeled Tony Schwartz. Sometimes it's worked spectacularly. With clients like Oracle and Salesforce. And sometimes it's gotten me fired. But there are just two fundamental questions I ask to draw out the company leadership and get into what I call "a state of play." Because genius doesn't occur unless you're in a state of play.

Question 1: "What do you do that nobody else can do?"

I have subsequently told them what I call "Ellison's Law." Namely, you are not allowed to say anything in your communications that anybody, anywhere else, can say. This is tougher than you think. The world will pay attention to "the only" and ignore "we're better."

Question 2: "What could a potential competitor do to blow you out of the water?"

I've got some funny stories that will never see the light of day. Many times, I've been with a CXO or Marcom group where they look at me, puff out their chests, and say there isn't such a thing. Then I flash a Powerpoint slide with a hypothetical ad someone might run, and panic hits the room. I am told to delete that slide, any electronic copies that might exist, and to remember that I'm under an NDA and will be sued off the face of the earth if I ever communicate that idea to anyone. Period.

I do my homework before ever taking that first meeting.

The reason I charge for a half-day guerrilla warfare seminar is that I spend some serious time doing my homework. And I won't even accept an advance retainer for a seminar if I can't come up with my own answers to the above questions. Yeah, I have some tools to help me arrive locked and loaded.

Oh, and a final note. Neither me nor any of my subsequent clients have ever been sued for one of my guerrilla warfare forays. Because in the final analysis, hard-core technological intimidation is just undeniably true.