Rather than simply more of the strategic role behaviors, the successful development of core capability demands variety. A similar hypothesis was suggested by Stuart Hart and Catherine Banbury who showed in a survey of top managers that firms who combined a diverse mix of strategy making skills enjoyed enhanced capability and organizational performance. These skills included everything from formal planning procedures, to informal experimentation and even creating a “dream” about the company future. [xii] Such skills and the behaviors associated with them are not likely to be distributed evenly throughout organizations. The successful formal planner, for example, is not likely to be the best dreamer. Similarly, middle managers are likely to differ widely in their ability and willingness to assume a strategic role at a particular point in time. As a result, one would expect considerable diversity in the levels of middle management strategic behavior within organizations that were successful in developing core capability.

Consistent with this, we asked top managers in each of the 25 companies we studied to assess the financial performance of their organization. Then we examined whether performance was associated with a statistical measure of diversity in middle management behavior. We found strong relationships between variation in the performance of the strategic roles and economic performance. This provided the first scientific evidence to support the proposition that middle managers are potential reservoirs of core capability. [xiii] But, how does this change the way one thinks of middle managers in a world of flatter, reengineered organizations?