Control the Centre. Don't Just Stand in It.
On owning the territory that everyone has to cross
The classical chess player occupies the centre with pawns and considers the matter settled. The hypermodern player watches patiently, then dismantles the entire structure from the flanks. The board looked identical. The outcome did not.
Most professionals are playing the classical game. Presence is confused with influence; occupation with control. The right title in the right room. The product that everyone uses. The standing slot with senior leadership on Tuesday mornings. It can look like positioning. It often isn't.
The hypermodern school of chess, pioneered by Aron Nimzowitsch in the 1920s, challenged the prevailing assumption about what "controlling the centre" actually requires. His core insight — that you could govern the centre without occupying it — turns out to be among the more instructive frameworks for understanding how durable advantage compounds. Slightly troubling that a deceased Latvian grandmaster has proved more strategically useful than most management literature. But the field sets a low bar.
The General Who Gave Away His Flank
Napoleon grasped something similar a century before Nimzowitsch codified it. At Austerlitz, his plan was not to hold every square but to control the terrain in ways that forced his enemies to make precisely the decisions he wanted them to make. He deliberately weakened his right flank — an invitation the Russian and Austrian commanders accepted with an enthusiasm they would shortly regret.
Nimzowitsch called his equivalent "prophylaxis": neutralising the opponent's intentions before they materialise, rather than reacting once the damage is already visible. In My System (1925), he argued that controlling the key squares requires no material on them whatsoever — only the capacity to make those squares central to everything the opponent is trying to achieve.
The position worth holding is not the one that appears important. It is the one that makes everything else possible, or impossible, for the other side.
The Toll Road Nobody Celebrated
Microsoft's real advantage in the 1990s was not Windows as a product. It was the API — the interface layer every application had to pass through to reach the user. Microsoft did not need to win at spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3), word processing (WordPerfect), or browsers (Netscape). It needed only to own the terrain on which those battles were fought. A toll road, in effect. Nobody celebrated a toll road. Everyone paid.
The same logic replayed with mobile. Google did not win by building the superior handset — it gave Android away free, because the handset was never the point. The operating system was the centre square. Every application, every search query, every transaction runs through it. Owning that layer meant every competitor's success was, at some level, flowing through Google's infrastructure.
Neither company aimed to be everywhere. They aimed to be the thing everything else had to cross.
The Frame That Governed Rooms You Never Entered
Here is the career version, which is somewhat less comfortable to say aloud. In most organisations, the most influential person is rarely the most senior. It is the one who set the frame everyone else is working inside.
Some years ago, I developed what amounted to a zoning plan for the platform under my remit — a map of what belonged where and how the parts should relate — and presented it to senior leadership and key stakeholders. What followed, I did not build. Two separate teams ran with it — one to separate workloads that needed to move fast from those that needed to stay stable, another to consolidate overlapping tools into components reusable across different user groups. The outcomes were tangible: sharper production quality, faster delivery, lower operating costs. I attended none of the implementation rooms where these decisions were made.
Shane Parrish has written about the compounding value of becoming a trusted signal rather than another source of noise. The people who accumulate real influence tend to be those who become irreplaceable filters, not those who generate the most visible activity. Output is legible. Framing is structural — and precisely because it is invisible, it persists long after the person who set it has left the room.
The question worth asking is not "am I in the room?" It is "does the room work differently when I am not?" In this instance, two rooms did.
The Risk of Playing Too Clever
The danger in positioning logic is that it curdles, quietly, into strategic abstention — the person perpetually playing the long game, committing to nothing specific, controlling everything in principle and nothing in practice. Nimzowitsch's hypermodern school was occasionally accused of exactly this: so sophisticated it sometimes forgot to win.
Microsoft's platform dominance held until mobile arrived and it did not control the operating system layer. The structure collapsed with uncommon speed. Google's Android success did not emerge from positioning theory alone; it required building something millions of people genuinely wanted to use, distributed at near-zero cost, faster than anyone else managed. The centre mattered. But they still had to play.
Positioning without output is, in the end, a very elegant way to lose.
Think about the last significant decision your organisation made without you in the room. Did your perspective shape it regardless — or were you informed of the outcome after the fact? The gap between influencing and being updated is the centre square. The question worth sitting with this week: what would it actually take to control it?
Still in the game. - J
