What a Finnish general, a Navy pilot, and a Prussian field marshal taught me about making decisions. Late 2006, Oulu. A dark winter evening at Rauhala, the historic restaurant. A room full of businesspeople, with a general at the front.
Gustav Hägglund had served as Finland’s Chief of Defense and later chaired the European Union Military Committee. He had just published Leijona ja kyyhky. He presented his 21 leadership principles, each drawn from a different assignment in his long career. Weapons barely came up.
Along the way, he set some of those principles against how business does things. Two of those comparisons have stayed with me ever since. A third lesson came years later, from a different direction. The first was about the team.
In business, he said, you can topgrade. You rank your people, reward the best, and let the weakest ten percent go. Jack Welch made it famous, and for a while every management book repeated it. In the army you cannot. The conscripts arrive in July and January, and they are the team you are given. Nobody sends you better ones. Your job is to train the people you have, prepare them for situations nobody can fully predict, and build enough trust that they will act when it matters. As he described it, training was the commander’s main job. Every week, until the unit could do the hard things without thinking.
The army has no exit door, so it has to build the capability inside. Now take that out of the barracks and put it inside a company. Most companies are closer to the army than they admit. In a small technology company in northern Finland, the next good engineer may be six months away. In a niche industry, the person you let go walks into your competitor’s office or your customer’s.
The labor market is a short bench. For most of us, the team we have is the team we will win or lose with. Topgrading is a tool for companies with abundance. Training is a tool for everyone else. The second comparison was about cutting.
When an organization must cut costs, the cuts usually land on the operational teams: the people who build, ship, service, and sell. The management layer above them usually stays intact. Hägglund’s view was simple. If you cut, cut symmetrically, and start at the top.
He framed it as a trust issue. Soldiers watch what their officers do far more than what they say. A cut that spares the leaders tells everyone below exactly whose position the organization values. After that, nobody believes a speech about shared sacrifice.
I think about this often now. Finland is balancing its public finances, and the reductions I see mostly hit operational units: the teachers, nurses, and frontline staff who deliver the service. The administrative layers above them seem to change much less.
Whatever one thinks of the budget itself, the pattern matches Hägglund's warning. A cut that starts at the bottom saves money once. A cut that starts at the top earns lasting trust.
The third comparison came a few years later. I was working for Danaher, and my boss was a former US Navy pilot. We often argued, with pleasure, about what business could learn from the military. One day he told me to read Colin Powell’s It Worked for Me and look closely at how decisions get made. What separates the commander from the manager is how much certainty each one waits for.
A commander rarely has all the facts. The enemy does not wait for the analysis to finish. Powell’s rule of thumb was to decide once you have somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of the information you would like.
Below 40 percent, you are guessing. Above 70 percent, the moment has usually passed. Business tends to treat delay as caution. A decision postponed for one more report is still a decision, usually the wrong one: letting the market or the competitor choose for you.
My boss had a second story about training. Every carrier landing a Navy pilot makes is graded. The landing signal officer on deck scores each approach, and the results go up on paper where the whole squadron can see them. Every week he could walk to the board and see exactly where he ranked.
Nobody needed a speech about continuous improvement. The paper on the wall did the work. You prepare people to decide fast on incomplete facts by having them practice the hard thing so often, and measuring it so openly, that the right move is already in their hands when the moment comes. Telling them to be decisive does very little.
Hägglund made the same point about the team you are given. You cannot choose better people. You can make the people you have better every week, and show them that they are.
Companies measure output every week, but very few measure the skill that produces it.
The last piece came from Stephen Bungay’s The Art of Action. Bungay, a historian turned strategy consultant, looked back at the Prussian army under Helmuth von Moltke. He asked why well-made plans fall apart when they meet reality.
His answer was three gaps. The knowledge gap sits between what we would like to know and what we actually know. The alignment gap sits between what we want people to do and what they actually do. The effects gap sits between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve.
The Prussian answer was less detail. Tell people what you want to achieve and why, then let them decide how. Today we call it mission command.
Here the three lessons meet. You can only decide fast with 60 percent of the facts if the people executing the decision understand its intent. People only understand intent if you have trained them instead of replacing them. They trust that intent only if leaders bear their share of the last hard cut.
Training, symmetry, and intent work as one system. Remove any one of them and the other two stop working. Run one test this week. Pick the decision you have postponed longest. Estimate honestly how much of the information you need you already have. If it is above 40 percent, set a date and decide.
Then explain the intent to the person who will carry it out, and ask what they would do if the plan breaks on the first day. If they cannot answer, the gap sits in your training, and more information will not close it.
Finally, look at what your team saw on the wall this week. If it was only last month’s revenue, nobody is being trained to land. I walked out of Rauhala that evening in 2006 thinking I had heard a general talk about the army. It took me years to understand he had been talking about us.
Kauko Väinämö, CEO, Ginolis.