Controlling The Center: The Best Strategy For Most Situations

Controlling the center is a key strategic principle observed in warfare, chess, business, politics, urban planning, negotiation, sales, and many other areas. It refers to gaining dominance over the most critical and influential position. This gives you greater mobility, control, and leverage over all your surrounding elements. At its core, the model highlights how positional advantage results in power, efficiency, and ultimately superiority. By aligning yourself with favorable characteristics, you get greater flexibility and access to bigger rewards.

The best example of this is a chess board. In chess, you can control the middle of the board. If you do, you tend to create more opportunities for yourself later in the game. This is because you are in a central position and can move to more squares than if you had pieces along the edges. Seizing the middle gives you options. That is the core idea: maximizing options and flexibility. When you have choices and your opponent does not, you are, by definition, in a position of power. The principle applies from military strategy to personal productivity.

Take the strategy of Proctor and Gamble. 298 out of 300 American households have at least one product from them in them. That’s virtually every American household. The company doesn’t just create any products, but those more or less indispensable for living. Think Pampers baby diapers, Ariel laundry products, Always feminine care, Old Spice hair care, or Gillette for overall personal care. Their business model is controlling the center. They are everywhere. Proctor and Gamble has incredible levels of insight into America’s purchasing patterns. Thus they can create complimentary products adjacent to their main brands and keep milking the cow.

For instance, look at Ariel. Ariel is a laundry detergent brand. You might buy and use it yourself. But Ariel is not the main driver of Proctor and Gamble’s laundry detergent sales. It’s a side project compared to Tide. Tide has over 14 percent of the global market share for laundry detergent. This is partly because Proctor and Gamble has expanded the Tide product line immensely. There are various scents, wipes, colors, stain removal pens, and even washing machine cleaners. They owned the center in the laundry detergent isles, thus introducing Ariel and all the other brands they own under the same category was a piece of cake. Note: seizing the middle is not always the best strategy. Sometimes it is more profitable to dominate the margins.

Where you might see controlling the center and how to use it as a mental model:

• Chess: dominating the board. In chess, players who control the center of the board—typically with pawns—gain greater mobility and tactical options. It works because pieces placed in the center can move in all directions, covering more ground. Opponents are forced into defense, reducing their strategic choices. How to exploit it: prioritize central control early in most strategy games and competitions; avoid getting pushed to the border, where your influence is limited.

• Warfare and military strategy: securing the high ground. Historically, military commanders who fought to control key locations—high ground, crossroads, or supply routes—won their battles. It works because holding a central or elevated position makes it easier to defend and harder for your opponent to attack. The troop can be quickly deployed in any direction. How to use: in decision-making, exploit positions of logical and strategic weight. Control that supply chain, infrastructure, and knowledge network which gives you dominance over rivals. Example: Napoleon used interior lines that allowed his soldiers to move rapidly between battlefronts, giving him an advantage despite being outnumbered.

• Business: in business, firms that control the center of an industry can leverage supply chains, customer bases, and competitor resources. It works since central market players—Amazon, Google, Apple—dictate the trends and pricing. By positioning themselves as an essential middle layer—platforms, infrastructure providers—they become indispensable. How to employ: find leverage points, areas where you have more influence than just your product or service offering. Position yourself as the “hub” of a network to create dependencies—cloud services, social networks, logistics. Example: Amazon controls the center of e-commerce by owning both the market and logistics side of things. Imagine how different their business model would be if they didn’t deliver the products themselves.

• Negotiation and power dynamics: controlling the agenda. In negotiations, controlling the topics and framing of a discussion gives you the advantage over the other party. It works because the side that controls the narrative dictates the flow of the conversation. You define the terms of the debate, forcing others into a reactionary, defensive role. How to use it: set the terms and structure of a conversation before others are able to impose theirs. Redirect discussions into areas where you have the most influence and expertise. Example: politicians control the center by owning key issues in which they are competent, forcing opponents to respond defensively, reinforcing their post.

Pro tips: (1) identify the central position, the place with the highest leverage within a system; (2) control key resources, securing the tools, people, and platforms that give you leverage; (3) expand outward only once you hold reign over the center; (4) deny rivals control by making it difficult for others to seize the center. The center is any high-leverage point, as exemplified above. It can be as simple as holding the television remote in your household. You hold the center for the movie everybody’s watching. Think using this mental model to anticipate outcomes a few moves ahead.