EP191 · Economy · first published 2023-05-08
Ice Hockey and World of Mouth | Saku Tuominen | Negotiator 191
Saku Tuominen — entrepreneur, non-fiction author and restaurateur — works through his sixteenth book, written with Liiga communications director Tuomas Nyholm, whose central claim is that the core of a successful coach's success is not winning but trust: anyone can win momentarily, but winning year after year requires a climate of trust running through the whole organisation. The episode explains the delayed breakout, the neutral-zone trap and pressure forechecking, describes Jukka Jalonen's twelve-minute playbook — whose core can be covered in three minutes and which is still extremely hard to play against — and assesses the competitive advantage Tampere's Nokia Arena confers. The second half is the restaurant app World of Mouth, where no expert may recommend their own restaurant, and the third is HundrED and the observation that education is an exceptionally siloed field. Published 8 May 2023.
Ice Hockey and World of Mouth | Saku Tuominen
Summary: In episode 191 Sami Miettinen interviews Saku Tuominen — entrepreneur, non-fiction author and restaurateur — about his sixteenth book, Jääkiekkokirja (Tämä ei ole) (“This is not an ice hockey book”, Otava 2023), written with Tuomas Nyholm, communications director of Finland’s Liiga. The conversation starts from trust as the core of coaching, runs through the tactical differences between the NHL and the Finnish league, and ends with the restaurant app World of Mouth, the education non-profit HundrED, and a set of spring 2023 predictions. Published 8 May 2023.
The book that is not an ice hockey book
Tuominen opens by explaining the book’s teasing subtitle. This is not an ice hockey book is about ice hockey, but its themes are meant to survive the move outside the sport: how to give people feedback, what to do when difficulties arrive, how to break a losing streak, how someone develops into a winner. The authors wanted the same material to work for raising children, leading people or reaching a state of flow.
The format is the book’s most original decision. Tuominen and Tuomas Nyholm — a sports journalist, biographer of Samu Haber and Jarkko Ruutu, crime novelist, twenty years covering hockey and now Liiga’s communications director — interviewed around ten coaches, top players, experts and general managers, asking precisely the things they themselves wanted to know: when do you take a timeout, how is a goalie change decided, do you shout at the players between periods, how is feedback given, how much can a coach change the game mid-period. The answers were distilled into a single fictional “coach’s voice”, and in the book both authors wrote both the questions and the answers. Miettinen twice tries to get Tuominen to admit the questioner’s voice is his — and the question finally resolves in the audiobook, where Tuominen and Nyholm read half the questions each and an actor reads the coach.
Trust at the core of winning
The thread running through the episode is what Tuominen says came up in almost every interview: at the core of a successful coach’s success is not winning but trust. Anyone can win momentarily; winning year after year requires a genuine climate of trust in the team and the whole organisation — players trust the coaches, the coach trusts the players, the employer trusts the coach — and the absence of everything being questioned all the time.
Miettinen recognises the same thing from the trust account in his own book Uusi neuvotteluvalta, written with Juhana Torkki, and notes with some amusement that fifteen years ago he was proud of discovering that trust is the foundation of the world — and here the conversation starts from trust again.
Tuominen’s two examples are concrete. In the Finnish national team, a player arriving from the NHL used to question the system; now almost none do, because everyone has seen it produce results year after year. At Tappara, the new coach arriving from Sweden says he would be mad to change a style of play backed by ten years of patient work — work that has produced a climate of trust visible in the finals against Pelicans, where the core message under pressure is to trust what brought you here.
A closed league or an open one
Miettinen asks directly why Liiga is closed when Kiekko-Espoo and Jokerit would be coming up. Tuominen separates two views honestly: as a pure sporting romantic, an open league would be better, because there would be competition at both ends of the table; but the economics are anything but unproblematic, since the jump from the second tier to Liiga is enormous and the transition is not easy to keep genuinely workable. He leaves it open by noting that the NHL works excellently as a closed league and Sweden’s works as an open one — there are examples on both sides.
Personally he is an IFK man, but he played his whole youth at Kiekko-Espoo and captained its junior A team for four years. The state of Espoo hockey over the previous six or seven years has saddened him, and he would consider Kiekko-Espoo’s promotion a big thing for Finnish hockey — as he would Jokerit’s return, because IFK–Jokerit is as fine a local derby as Islanders–Rangers or Tappara–Ilves.
The episode’s sharpest structural observation is about arenas. The capital region, home to over a million people, has one Liiga team and a couple of half-sized arenas. Tampere’s Nokia Arena is, in Tuominen’s words, a money machine, but he thinks its real innovation is its location: two minutes from the railway station, in the centre of town, against the habit of building arenas somewhat further out. The revenue from a full arena compounds, and he reckons Tappara and Ilves get an enormous competitive advantage from it for the next five or six years. Miettinen adds that Helsinki is the only place where its own projects get knifed.
The NHL, Liiga and the rise of system play
Tuominen concedes the NHL is by far the world’s most interesting league, and justifies it by depth: the quality on the third and fourth lines is very high. The conversation happens in spring 2023, mid-playoffs, which makes it interesting as a snapshot.
System play is gaining on star power. New Jersey beat New York’s stars; Seattle, a team without names, knocked out Colorado and pushed Dallas hard; Toronto has the more famous roster and is behind Florida anyway. The same holds in Finland: almost nobody would have bet on Pelicans reaching the final and playing well against Tappara.
On Finnish players, his observation is that there have always been good Finns in the NHL — the Kurris, Tikkanens and Selännes — but the current core group is exceptionally strong: Miro Heiskanen, Roope Hintz, Mikko Rantanen, Sasha Barkov, Sebastian Aho and Patrik Laine are all among the league’s brightest stars at the same time. Miettinen admits to sometimes rating Sebastian Aho above Rantanen, and Tuominen rates Florida’s Luostarinen–Lundell line above even Barkov’s line at that moment.
The delayed breakout, the trap, and Jalonen’s twelve minutes
The technical heart of the episode is the question of what a delayed breakout means. Tuominen explains it as part of what Finland calls “our game”. The term got a bad name five to seven years ago when breakouts were extremely slow — back behind the net, wait, circle. The aim now is to leave in a controlled way: gather the team, get the passing lanes right, and cross the neutral zone with plenty of passing options and rhythm in the play. Tappara, he says, is enormously good at setting the rhythm of a game, as are the national team.
In the NHL the same does not work, because the rink is smaller and individuals matter more: if you keep trying a delayed breakout there, the forechecking team comes so hard that you cannot get out. There the play is turned immediately and everyone forechecks. In Europe the contest is between the delayed breakout and the neutral-zone trap, and what decides it is who is better at crossing or clogging the neutral zone. A third term is pressure forechecking: instead of sending one man, you send three, as long as you do not play yourself out of the picture.
The book’s most teasing detail is that the authors saw Jukka Jalonen’s entire twelve-minute playbook but promised not to share it. Tuominen describes its structure: situations that recur often in a game, five or six examples of each, which Jalonen goes through with the players as a good-example / bad-example pair. His conclusion is the best single observation in the episode: the core of the Finnish national team’s game can be covered in three minutes, every coach in the world knows it — and playing against it is still extremely hard.
As a counter-example he offers Kari Jalonen, then coach of Czechia, who almost certainly had an equally good playbook, but whose team acquired stars like Pastrnak who concluded that this was not how they play. Miro Heiskanen, meanwhile, plays a completely different game in Dallas than he does for Finland. The difference is whether the coach gets the players to follow the system.
From old-school authority to coach education
The question about the old school produces the episode’s clearest passage on leadership. For Tuominen it is less about tactics than about how people are treated: the old model is “a bit of The Unknown Soldier school of management” — shouting, throwing things, forcing compliance. The new generation of players responds by asking for the reasoning. Modern coaching mostly goes through the positive, which does not mean being soft but means factual feedback and growing people. He names Tommi Niemelä, Jussi Tapola and Ville Peltonen as examples of how players are spoken about.
He speaks of Hannu Jortikka respectfully but plainly: a really good coach whose approach to leading people is nonetheless not transferable one-to-one to the present day.
On coaches who were players, he is unambiguous: nearly every top coach played at some level. Ville Peltonen is his most interesting example, because he approaches coaching with the same elite-competitor’s seriousness he brought to playing — reading people’s minds, positive feedback, growth mindset, psychology, conversation, experiments and development.
Culture is slower than a season
On IFK, Tuominen gives two contradictory but honest readings: in the previous three years, a bronze game almost every year, two bronzes and one fourth place — not a catastrophe on the face of it, but everyone in the organisation knows it is mild underperformance. He takes his hat off to IFK for not sacking Ville Peltonen after a difficult season, as many clubs would have done.
The comparisons are Tappara (nine finals in ten years) and Pelicans, whose success in his view was not created now but ten years ago, when Janne Laukkanen and others started building a culture. Lukko builds a competitive team on a small budget year after year, and TPS, criticism notwithstanding, does patient work on many fronts — the game, building the organisation, junior work, even social media and pride concerts. His model is that you do not buy stars every season; you build a strong young base from below.
On Tappara’s new Swedish coach he makes the episode’s most interesting prediction: he is unquestionably a top coach, but the culture he represents — a great deal of freedom for the players — is almost night and day compared with what has been the style of Liiga, the national team and Tappara. His assessment is that Tappara may be more vulnerable next season than it has been in years, and that this collision of cultures is one of the most interesting things in Finnish hockey right now.
World of Mouth: the Spotify of restaurant guides
The third passion is food. Tuominen is a part-owner of three restaurants — Savoy, Palace and Cafe Savoy — but his main work is the restaurant app World of Mouth, whose goal is to be the world’s best restaurant app, because no such thing exists.
The model is simple and its critical rule is a rule of honesty. The app identifies the world’s top experts, who recommend their own favourite places to others — but no expert may ever recommend their own restaurant. Tuominen therefore cannot recommend Savoy, Palace or Cafe Savoy. The experts include the people behind the world’s best restaurants of the previous five years: Mauro Colagreco of Mirazur, René Redzepi of Noma, Rasmus Kofoed of Geranium.
The numbers at the time of recording: 75,000 users, about 10,000 recommendations across roughly 2,000 cities, hundreds of new users a day, the largest market being the United States at around 32 per cent. London has 306 recommendations, Helsinki about 200, Naples 11. When Phil Rosenthal, host of Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil, named it his favourite app, twenty thousand users arrived at once.
Speed is the core of the product. When a hot new place opens in Copenhagen, it is in the app within a week; one Tallinn opening was there four days after it opened, whereas Michelin follows years later if at all. The same applies to the places flying under the radar in Helsinki.
The positioning comes from the design director of Ilse Crawford, who designed Savoy’s renovation, and whom Tuominen asked to name the world’s leading food trend. The answer: everyone is a foodie now. In that culture TripAdvisor is too mainstream for many and Michelin too static for some — World of Mouth wants to sit between them, the Spotify of restaurant guides. And the whole spectrum belongs in it: from Helsinki it carries Hopia, Karelian pasties and Eromanga’s meat pie as well as Palace.
The next step is AI. Tuominen’s goal is that within about a year the app has a strong AI element that learns who you are and can, at the press of a button in Miami, tell you which seven nearby places you will probably like — and tell the difference between a business meeting and a looser evening.
Fine dining is not dying, but something is
Asked about the fading of three-star cooking, Tuominen answers precisely. The death of fine dining is always being discussed, and there will continue to be room in the world for three-star restaurants. What is dying is artificial, almost Renaissance-court cooking with absurd ingredients at absurd prices, often loss-making, where a hundred people produce twenty dishes. The sustainable version has a sensible number of people in the kitchen and sensible ingredients — and is profitable. Palace is his example: Eero Vottonen and his team do superb work, and on top of that the place makes money, which among two-star restaurants worldwide is a rarity. When René Redzepi says fine dining is dying because it is loss-making, Tuominen’s answer is: some of it is, some of it is not.
A side remark produces the episode’s most surprising ESG fact. When measurements have been run at Palace, Savoy and Cafe Savoy, there is essentially no food waste — not because it is measured, but because the ingredients are good and they know how many people are coming.
Miettinen asks the counter-question of whether sensor technology fits a top kitchen — he sits on the board of Fredman Group, whose Chefstein app brings technology into the kitchen. Tuominen’s answer is that a top restaurant already measures a fair amount: doneness, times and so on.
Negotiations, Wahlroos and long lunches
Miettinen returns to his own book: over ten years ago he asked Nalle Wahlroos whether the young investment banker’s stereotype holds, that everything is negotiated in a Savoy private room. Wahlroos’s answer was that fine dining as a negotiating venue had gone out of fashion. Tuominen disagrees about the present: Savoy’s seventh floor was completely renovated, and people coming to eat well and talk at length in peace is, he thinks, very much in fashion. What has become rare is the four- or five-hour lunch — which Helena Puolakka often calls to bring back, and which Tuominen thinks would do people some good.
HundrED and the siloing of education
The last subject is HundrED, whose board Tuominen chairs and whose executive director is Lasse Leponiemi. The organisation is entirely non-profit, with no commercial accelerator attached. It identifies education innovations and helps them spread: every year it selects a hundred innovations that are impactful and scalable — evidenced as working and already scaled beyond a single country. HundrED operates in over a hundred countries and has reviewed thousands of innovations, and was opening a centre in Geneva to study implementation specifically: why one innovation has spread to every school in Latin America, say, and why another excellent one spreads nowhere.
Tuominen’s diagnosis is the episode’s second broadly transferable observation: education is an exceptionally siloed field. In almost any other area of business a good idea spreads — Netflix spreads, Uber spreads, Wolt spreads — but in education hardly anything spreads from one country to another. He believes this will change at some point, but it has not changed yet.
Miettinen ties the subject to his own work: he has done M&A deals in all three of Tuominen’s areas. In hockey, Suora Broadcast, which streams Finland’s hockey matches, was sold to a Swedish company owned by the Olsson family; in edtech, the Translink team was selling Studeo, the third-largest publisher of upper-secondary learning materials, to the German Klett family.
Predictions from spring 2023
The episode ends on predictions, best read as a snapshot of the moment.
NHL: Tuominen expects Florida to eliminate favourites Toronto and guesses an eastern final of Carolina–Florida — Carolina would probably have reached the final anyway but has many injuries. In the west he thinks Edmonton leans too heavily on stars, Las Vegas is frighteningly strong, and Dallas will probably beat Seattle. Florida–Dallas would, he says, be the greatest all-Finnish final ever: Heiskanen, Hakanpää, Lindell, Hintz, Lundell, Luostarinen and Barkov. And if he had to choose between Tappara and Florida as the next winner, he would very much rather it were Florida — “Tappara has had quite enough”.
World Championship: winning a second home tournament is a hard thought and carries certain curses, but Jalonen’s cemented system, genuine superstars like Rantanen and Kakko, and possibly Europe’s best goaltender make Finland the clear favourite. His prediction is a Finland–Sweden final that Finland wins, though Canada is always strong and Sweden, well coached, is very tough.
The ending returns to the beginning. The core of Finland’s game is trust even when the game is being lost — and whether the goalie has a bad night or a shot happens to go in is exactly what makes ice hockey good.
A note on the source
The episode was transcribed with MacWhisper and the transcript carries no speaker labels. With only one guest the speakers are reliably distinguishable, and named attributions rest on evidence in the transcript. There are no gaps in the transcription. The cleaned cue file corrects a substantial number of sports and restaurant proper names that the automatic transcription mangled; where a name could not be verified, the transcription’s own form has been kept.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Jääkiekko World of Mouth | Saku Tuominen | Neuvottelija 191.