Ice Hockey and World of Mouth | Saku Tuominen | Neuvottelija 191

Summary

Saku Tuominen — entrepreneur, non-fiction author and restaurateur — came on to discuss his sixteenth book, written with Liiga communications director Tuomas Nyholm, whose subtitle insists it is not an ice hockey book. The authors interviewed around ten coaches, top players, experts and general managers, asking the things they themselves wanted to know — when a timeout is taken, how a goalie change is decided, whether anyone shouts between periods — and distilled the answers into a single fictional coach’s voice.

The book’s central claim is that 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 across the whole organisation, and the absence of everything being questioned all the time. Tuominen’s examples are concrete: a player arriving from the NHL used to question Finland’s system and almost none do now, because everyone has seen it work; and Tappara’s new coach, arriving from Sweden, says he would be mad to change a style backed by ten years of patient work.

The tactical section is unusually concrete for a podcast. The delayed breakout means leaving in a controlled way — gathering the team, getting the passing lanes right, crossing the neutral zone with rhythm — as opposed to the very slow version that gave the term a bad name years ago. It does not transfer to the NHL, where the rink is smaller, individuals matter more and a forechecking team comes too hard to escape. In Europe the contest is between the delayed breakout and the neutral-zone trap, decided by who is better at crossing or clogging the middle; a third term is pressure forechecking, sending three men instead of one. The best single observation concerns Jukka Jalonen’s twelve-minute playbook, which the authors were allowed to watch but not share: the core of Finland’s game can be covered in three minutes, every coach in the world knows it, and playing against it is still extremely hard. The counter-example is Kari Jalonen’s Czechia, which had an equally good playbook and stars who concluded it was not how they play.

Two structural arguments are worth extracting. First, Tampere’s Nokia Arena: its real innovation is being two minutes from the railway station rather than out of town, and the revenue from a full arena compounds into what Tuominen reckons is an enormous competitive advantage for Tappara and Ilves over five or six years, while the capital region — over a million people — has one Liiga team and a couple of half-sized halls. Second, culture runs slower than a season: Pelicans’ success was created ten years earlier, Lukko builds a competitive team on a small budget year after year, and Tuominen’s model is a strong young base from below rather than buying stars each season. He also predicts Tappara may be more vulnerable next season than it has been in years, as a Swedish coach’s freer culture meets a decade-old Finnish system.

The second half is the restaurant app World of Mouth, whose governing rule is that no expert may ever recommend their own restaurant — so Tuominen cannot recommend Savoy, Palace or Cafe Savoy, the three restaurants he part-owns. At the time of recording: 75,000 users, about 10,000 recommendations across some 2,000 cities, the US the largest market at about 32 per cent. Speed is the product: a hot Copenhagen opening appears within a week, where Michelin follows years later if at all. The positioning came from Ilse Crawford’s design director, who named the leading food trend as everyone is a foodie now — which puts World of Mouth between a too-mainstream TripAdvisor and a too-static Michelin, as the Spotify of restaurant guides. Tuominen’s distinction on fine dining is the sharpest part: what is dying is artificial, almost Renaissance-court cooking with absurd ingredients at absurd prices, often loss-making; what is not dying is the profitable kind, of which Palace under Eero Vottonen is his example — a rarity among two-star restaurants worldwide.

The last section is HundrED, the education non-profit Tuominen chairs, which selects a hundred impactful and scalable education innovations a year and was opening a centre in Geneva to study implementation specifically. His diagnosis travels furthest of anything in the episode: 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.

The episode closes on spring 2023 predictions, best read as a snapshot: Florida to eliminate Toronto, a Florida–Dallas final that would be the greatest all-Finnish final ever, and a Finland–Sweden World Championship final that Finland wins.

A note on the source

The MacWhisper transcript carries no speaker labels, but with a single guest the speakers are reliably distinguishable and named attributions rest on evidence in the transcript. There are no gaps in the transcription. The cleaned Finnish cue file corrects a substantial number of sports and restaurant proper names the automatic transcription mangled; where a name could not be verified, the transcription’s own form was kept and it is not repeated here.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Jääkiekko World of Mouth | Saku Tuominen | Neuvottelija 191. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.