Initiatives Win When They Come From the Edge

Andy Grove's planners, a Finnish hockey coach, and the formation that slows an initiative until it runs out of ice.

In May 2019, between customer visits, I watched the World Championship final from a hotel room. Canada had the NHL stars. Finland had a roster few people believed in, and Finland won 3 to 1.

For most of the game, not much happened. Canada put four skaters in the neutral zone and closed the passing lanes. Finland got slowed down again and again, kept trying, and eventually got through. I have run companies for thirty years. Middle management uses the same formation.

In 1985, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore decided that Intel would exit the memory business. Grove later wrote that the factories barely noticed. For years, production planners had given factory capacity to the most profitable products, and those were already microprocessors.

That story gets quoted as proof that middle management drives strategy. It proves something narrower. Middle management moves when the numbers already say so.

In the neutral zone trap, nobody refuses the puck, and nobody tackles. Every entry gets slowed until the play dies of its own weight. A company traps an initiative the same way. The pilot needs one more review. The engineer is busy until next quarter. The right person raises the risk just as the decision is about to be made.

Each move is reasonable on its own. Nobody kills the initiative. It runs out of ice. Jukka Jalonen, Finland's head coach, has four gold medals, three of them with rosters nobody rated. Every coach knows the way through a trap, and very few execute it, because it demands patience when instinct says push.

The first rule is to keep the puck out of the middle. A CEO who pushes a project through by authority, meeting by meeting, is the player the formation was built for. The second rule is to move before the formation sets. The initiative should arrive with its economics already visible: the order it wins, the cost it removes, the margin per wafer.

The third rule is to use the width of the ice. The initiatives that get through start at the edge: one customer, one site, one production line. They are producing evidence by the time the center notices them.

The fourth rule is to regroup when the lane closes. You reset without drama, because the trap wants you frustrated. Take the initiative you care most about this year and trace where it entered. A slide in a management meeting means it came in from the middle. A plant manager, a customer, or a line already showing a number means it came in from the boards.

The trap defends against initiatives that arrive from the center with authority and no evidence. It has no answer for one that arrives from the side with the numbers already on the board.

Kauko Väinämö, CEO, Ginolis.