Mike Millett and Elevate or Vanish
Elevate or Vanish is Mike Millett's business transformation thesis and free book. Trust creates momentum. Customers move toward brands they trust.
Elevate or Vanish is Mike's business transformation thesis and a free book. Markets rarely announce the moment a business becomes outdated. Perception shifts first, expectations change, competitors become easier to understand, and technology changes how businesses are found and evaluated. A business can adapt deliberately, or wait until the market forces the decision.
Trust creates momentum.
Customers move toward brands they trust.
Elevate or Vanish
Why he wrote it
Two experiences sit underneath it and they point the same way.
He watched somebody at the absolute top of a trade get ended by a technology shift he chose not to cross. Being the best at it did not save him. That is the half of the thesis that keeps it from being smug: it is not a story about clever people beating slow ones.
Then, years later, he led the StratusClean repositioning and saw the same shape from the other side. A business the market had stopped categorising correctly, and four years of work to fix it, almost none of which was design.
Why it is a warning and not a slogan
Because he has stood on both sides of it. He has been the person who saw a shift coming and had no plan to offer, at a company meeting in March 2023, and lost credibility for it. He has also been the person who found the plan afterwards and was proved right slowly.
A thesis written by somebody who has only ever been right about this would be worth much less.
Where it lives
The thesis and the book are published at Elevate or Vanish, free to read, with no email required.