Our descriptions of middle management's strategic roles are not meant to minimize the contributions of top- and operating-level managers. Yet, the combination of operating experience and strategic awareness found among middle managers appears to be central in the deployment of core capabilities and the development of new capabilities. The people in the middle may simply be in the best position to understand how the activities going on around them fit the evolving strategic context. Their knowledge base is rich, including a deep appreciation for the specific resources available within the business and in the industry.

Seen through our own conceptual lens, there was already some supporting anecdotal evidence for a link between middle management and core capability. Because the argument countered prevailing wisdom, however, we wanted to go beyond logic and case study to examine the issue more systematically. Thus, we developed a questionnaire that would measure middle manager behavior in a large scale, statistical survey. The research design called for observation of hundreds of middle managers across many organizations and drew from a combination of objective as well as subjective data. Because different strategies rely on different capabilities, we expected to tie the middle manager roles to the success of particular organizational strategies.

The results uncovered three convincing patterns. [xi] First, in organizations whose strategy depended more on product innovation, exploiting new market opportunities, and maintaining flexible operational priorities, we found significantly higher levels of middle management championing and facilitating, when compared to organizations whose strategy relied more on a narrow product line and operational efficiency. Since core capability in innovating firms is related to the discovery of new business opportunity and operational flexibility, these results suggested the centrality of middle management.