Lead Buffalo is easily identified by the haunting melodies of its vocalist, Robert Plant, backed by the folk-rock guitar sounds of Stephen Stills and Neil Young.
No, that’s Led Buffalo. And if it’s being led, obviously it can’t be lead. 
The dominant cow isn’t too hard to pick out if you observe a herd for a while. She’s the one all the other cows make way for. My brother has a small bison ranch, and on occasion he’ll drive out into the pasture in the pickup and feed them a bit of oats, just by dumping it out of a pail into several piles. The dominant cow will actually move from pile to pile, pushing the others out of her way to assert her position in the herd. Any cow trying to move in on the pile she’s eating at gets The Look and then backs off. Or, if it ignores The Look, gets a quick head butt and then scurries off.
That said, the story in the OP smells like bullshit to me. While I’ve obviously never experimentally killed the dominant cow in the herd just to see how the others react, bison are a flighty bunch, and if they’re running from a perceived threat I can’t imagine them stopping if one animal goes down, regardless of its position in the hierarchy. Certainly the herd doesn’t run only if the lead cow starts it. Any member of the herd regardless of how low it ranks will set the whole lot to running if it is startled into flight.
You can lead a buffalo to water, but you can’t make him think.
(With apologies to Dorothy Parker.)
Another problem with the leadership guide linked in the OP is that here we are, staring 2010 in the face, and the material says it’s for leaders of the 90s.
This can only end badly.
Some time back there was a discussion of the various business improvement paradigms, and some very smart poster, I forget who, pointed out that most of the scenarios play out this way:
- Upper management hs not idea what’s going on because middle management won’t pass on what rank and file has told them.
- Upper management offers big money to consultant with Flavor-of-the-Month management paradigm
- Consultant, under guise of Flavor-of-the-Month paradigm, talks to rank and file, middle management and upper management
- Consultant tells upper management what rank and file told middle management
- Upper management suddenly knows what’s going on, signs fat check
- Consultant leaves with fat check, upper management goes back to listening to middle management, who won’t pass along rank and file info
- Repeat until next consultant
Not if you perfected time travel.
That’s in Lesson Two. Additional charges apply.
How can Stills and Young both be Lead Buffalo? Wouldn’t one of them have to play Bass?
I suggest you shoot the manager, make a bonfire out of the handout binders, and roast up a delicious feast of chicken wings in a spicy sauce à Buffalo for the rank and file. Move a bowl of bleu cheese nearby.
And certainly more of a success than the collaboration of Jimmy Page with Jim Messina to form The Springfield Zeppelin.
Without going into the long story of “How my uncle’s brother-in-law’s bison herd got let out by one neighbor who was mad at another neighbor but couldn’t tell whose gate was whose.” …
Bison frequently spend time outside herds. It seems they even prefer not to be in a herd unless there is some need. E.g., breeding, migration, etc. They definitely don’t stay in a herd once let loose on Idaho range land. And once on their own, they are nasty things to try to round up. (They will attack horses and will get into places that ATVs can’t go.) They don’t need a leader to take care of themselves.