ASML Book Notes
"You cover an amazing amount of detail, with insider perspectives, mixed story formats and some great charts." Paul Schoemaker, PhD, strategic management professor.
"Few investors would bet their money on this venture today. The story of ASML is therefore not a recipe that can be easily copied by other high-tech start-ups. However, a lot can be learned from looking at what happened." Gjalt Smit, first CEO of ASML.
A ten-part series of reflections and chapter notes accompanying Lessons Learned from ASML.
May 28, 2026
Blog 10 of 10 | On the Tenth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML: It's a Wrap
Last week, we laid ASML's history horizontally and examined the development of the company's business equations, four core principles that, despite taking different forms across different phases, continued to shape the essential nature of the organization. This week, Susanne and I conclude the series in much the same way Chapter 10 concludes the book itself: by reflecting on how the story came together, looking back on the past weeks, and considering what these insights may mean for you as a reader.
The image accompanying this blog is Another World (1947) by M.C. Escher. We chose it for two reasons. What has always fascinated us more than ASML's mind-boggling technology is the organization capable of developing and commercializing such technology while operating at the edge of what is physically possible. The way people collaborate there, and the way the organization collectively sustains momentum over decades, genuinely differs from what we have encountered elsewhere. In that sense, it truly is another world.
At the same time, throughout this book we have tried to offer multiple perspectives, lenses, and approaches to make sense of that world. None captures the whole picture on its own; together, they form an interpretation we have tried to construct as carefully and honestly as possible.
This book and the accompanying blog series are built on more than fifteen years of individual research and over ten years of joint research. We grouped more than 1,000 documents from ASML's early decades along a timeline: business plans, board minutes, memos, organizational charts, annual reports. Gradually, an internal history of more than eighty pages emerged.
In addition, between 2012 and 2021 we conducted more than thirty in-depth interviews with current and former employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors, often speaking with the same individuals multiple times. Trade journals and contemporary newspaper articles helped protect us from the temptation to read history as though the outcome had always been inevitable. The documents also allowed us to compare memories with what had actually been recorded at the time, because time and success tend to do strange things to the human mind.
Alongside this, we continuously engaged with the academic literature since 2012, connecting the ASML story to broader discussions on crises, capabilities, and technological transitions.
One of the most striking aspects of the research was that when we interviewed people independently, sometimes decades after the events, and without them having spoken to one another, they would often use remarkably similar formulations to describe key moments and individuals. An audible collective memory, revealing something about how the organization internalized its own history.
Over the past weeks, we highlighted the different chapters in a non-chronological order, gradually moving from the abstract toward the concrete. Here, we briefly revisit them one final time.
Waterfall established the terrain: what ASML does, how EUV lithography works, and why complacency is considered taboo inside ASML, where its dominant position may never be perceived internally as a monopoly.
In Relativity, we treated chance and luck as serious explanatory factors in the ASML story. Chance, luck, and serendipity are often grouped together, even though each demands a different managerial response. We explored the notion of chance and necessity: how do organizations respond to events that either help or hurt them?
Belvedere examined what an extraordinarily specific case can still teach others. Here, we attempted to capture the theoretical patterns visible in ASML through lenses that may also help interpret organizations in very different contexts. That bridge must be built carefully, because contexts as specific as ASML's resist easy generalization.
In Three Worlds, Susanne and I temporarily set aside theory and data to present our own perspectives on working under uncertainty: disciplined readiness on one side, and a systemic perspective attentive to the human undercurrent on the other.
Hand with Reflecting Sphere reversed the lens, from ASML toward the reader. Managers, deep-tech founders, executives, policymakers: four different seats, each with its own context, constraints, and room for action. Whatever seat you occupy, the question remains the same: how do you translate what worked in Veldhoven into something meaningful in your own setting?
Drawing Hands moved the story to the level of the semiconductor industry as a whole. We examined The Decision of the Century surrounding the Next Generation of Lithography, and the insight that a shared roadmap derives authority not from technical correctness alone, but from the fact that the industry collectively created it.
In Three Spheres II, we brought the NGL decision back to ASML itself. We connected real options logic with a scientific mindset, and explored the 1995 decision to internalize the strategic question surrounding future lithography technologies. "Do not outsource the question," as Jos Benschop put it.
In Mobius Strip II, we placed forty years of ASML alongside one another in five acts, from permanent financial scarcity, through market leadership, to apparent indispensability. A story about how apparent chaos, combined with clear role awareness, can generate exceptionally fertile flows of knowledge and learning.
Finally, in Magic Mirror, last week, we looked across time itself: the four business equations that functioned as a grammar recognizable across forty years. Deliberately designed and imprinted into the organization, and reinforced through every crisis.
In the final chapter of the book, we write:
"Each management book you read, this one included, is just another piece in the puzzle, another training example for the large language model in your own head."
What we hope is that this book becomes one of those building blocks in your own thinking, something that helps you look more sharply at your own organization tomorrow. Paper is patient; without action, everything remains on the shelf. We are deeply curious to see what movements these perspectives may ultimately trigger.
If you still have questions following this series, the book, or the podcast, please feel free to reach out.
Next week, on June 2, Lessons from ASML - Building and Sustaining Innovativeness under Uncertainty will officially be published by Lannoo Campus. Until then, you can pre-order a signed copy here, Susanne and I will include a personal message.
May 21, 2026
Blog 9 of 10 | On the Third Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML: Same Rules, Dynamic Game
Last week, Susanne and I lay that history horizontally and looked for the underlying patterns. Which decision rules from the earliest days carried all of those episodes? And how can an organization remain highly innovative and adaptable while never letting go of choices made during its very first summer?
In M. C. Escher's Magic Mirror (1946), a mirror sits at the center of a surface. A winged lion emerges from it, splits into two streams, and marches across the plane while repeatedly changing form along the way. What makes the creatures recognizable through all those transformations is their shared origin: the mirror from which they emerged. Their essence remains intact while their forms continuously change. Chapter 3 explores how a similar pattern emerged within ASML.
The choice that ASML's first CEO, Gjalt Smit, presented to the supervisory board in the summer of 1984 was binary: stop, or go for gold. There was no middle path.
Reading the business plan that the top management team wrote that summer remains striking. It contains remarkably explicit assumptions about how the market should be approached, how the company wanted to organize itself internally, and which organizational choices were considered essential. These were concrete principles, deliberately formulated and weighted, which were later translated into action.
Only years later, when a group of former managers around 2000 tried to document the company's history, were these retrospectively described as business equations, as if market leadership were something that could be solved mathematically.
From the interaction between the original business plan, those later reflections, archival material, and interviews with key actors, we distilled four business equations. What those four are, how we arrived at them, and how they remained visible decades later form the backbone of this chapter.
When speaking with people from the earliest years, forty years later, two different versions of that summer emerge.
One comes from the promising young engineers of the time, close to top management, but not yet major decision-makers themselves. Among them were Frits van Hout, later CSO, and Martin van den Brink, later CTO. Their interpretation: there was barely any strategy. The company largely worked with whatever resources it had, and many things later called strategic choices were in reality products of scarcity.
Martin put it this way in our interview:
"If you have no strategy, well, for instance, what we said to have as a strategy in the first ten years is that we are going to be light [...] We are not going to insource supplies, we do it all outside. And you define it today as a strategy. At the time, there was no strategy at all; you had no money."
Only in retrospect, Martin argued, did events acquire the appearance of a coherent plan.
The board and senior executives from those early years describe it differently. The business plan itself, which we revisited repeatedly during the research, lends support to their view. It is a document that thinks remarkably carefully about the organization it intended to build, treating the machine as only one component of a larger system.
Both interpretations reveal something that cannot be reconciled by simply choosing one over the other. One reflects the day-to-day reality of surviving with too few people and too few resources. The other reflects intention: how ideas were formulated, repeated, and transmitted through documents, speeches, and onboarding programs.
What organizations carry forward across generations is usually the latter. That may explain why so much inside ASML decades later still resembles a plan written by people who themselves felt they were simply trying to survive.
The HAY consultant Thone, who supported ASML in structuring the organization in 1985, captured the core challenge in an internal note:
"The future is unpredictable, flexibility is indispensable. The challenge is to balance that with a sense of direction, to be able to clearly communicate and get a sense of control in the organization."
How do you maintain direction in an environment that constantly demands adaptability and improvisation?
Forty years of ASML suggest one answer. The four business equations formed a grammar that remained remarkably stable over time, while the sentences built from them continuously evolved.
One equation concerned maintaining an open and proactive relationship with customers. In 1985, that meant personal relationships between a handful of people. By 2003, the same principle had expanded into global multidisciplinary account teams, research consortia with institutes such as IMEC, and joint development programs with chipmakers and their ecosystems.
The underlying structure remained recognizable. The practice became almost unrecognizable.
For us, this is where ASML's resilience emerged: the rules established in 1984 became a compass within which forty years of improvisation could occur, without losing direction.
When can such a grammar be written, or rewritten?
In day-to-day operations, revisiting fundamental assumptions is usually the last thing organizations do. What the literature calls sensitive periods are rare moments when established patterns become temporarily fluid: deep crises, technological discontinuities, or sudden growth shocks.
ASML experienced three such periods in the years we studied: the industry downturn immediately after its founding, the existential crisis of 1991-1992, and the dot-com collapse of 2001.
In each case, the company could have rewritten its grammar, adding rules, abandoning them, or replacing them altogether. What happened instead is what the chapter explores in detail.
In Chapter 2, we followed ASML longitudinally. Chapter 3 turns history sideways: four business equations, each traced through three different crises.
Only through that cross-sectional perspective does it become visible which rules actually endured, and which transformations were necessary for them to survive.
If you study only one moment, you mostly understand that moment. Only a sequence reveals what runs underneath them all.
Ultimately, everything returns to the chapter's central question: how can a carefully chosen set of rules become the compass that allows an organization to continuously reorient itself in a turbulent world?
A question that returns in every turbulent industry, and one to which ASML developed an answer that remains visible today.
Next week, we will conclude the series. This time, we turn the lens toward you and me, and what, as readers, we should make of all this.
May 13, 2026
Blog 8 of 10 | On the Second Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
Last week, we ended with the promise to return to how ASML's focus on one product and one business line historically emerged. Chapter 2 provides the building blocks for that story. To keep the whole manageable, Susanne and I divide forty years of ASML into five acts. In each period, we examine the same three elements: the context and challenge facing the organization, the strategic choices that were made, and the outcomes that followed from their execution. A complete company history would have required several additional books. What Chapter 2 offers instead is a canon: a structured selection of defining moments that reveals the coherence behind the development of ASML's innovativeness over time.
The Escher image accompanying this blog is M. C. Escher's Mobius Strip II (1963), showing ants moving endlessly across a Mobius strip. We chose it because of a remark by Willem Maris, ASML's third CEO, who once described the organization as an anthill, everyone constantly moving through one another, chaotic at first sight, yet somehow highly effective. Fia Loozen, for many years secretary to the board, added in an interview that despite this idiosyncratic atmosphere, everyone clearly understood their role and place within the whole. The constant interaction, coordination, and informal exchanges had an important side effect: knowledge and insights flowed continuously through the organization.
In this chapter, we follow ASML through five phases, each with its own obstacles and challenges, yet all part of the same continuum.
ASML began as a spin-off dismissed by its own industry as a hopeless outsider, the last among seven competitors. Employees who joined the fragile start-up were promised that, if things failed, they could return to Philips within four years.
Ten years later, the company was still small and frequently close to bankruptcy, with Philips seriously considering selling the business in 1992 for a symbolic one guilder. By the turn of the century, ASML shared the market with only two remaining Japanese competitors. Another decade later, it had become the only company in the world capable of delivering the most advanced lithography systems.
The company evolved from permanent financial scarcity to market leadership and eventually to what appears today as near indispensability. The transition between each phase was marked by a significant crisis. In the chapter, each act contains one or two episodes explored as mini-stories: a flight from San Francisco during which the first CEO arrived at a fundamental insight after half a bottle of wine; a last-minute rescue by a Philips board member who convinced his own organization to finance ASML for another nine months; or orders entering production before contracts had even been signed. These episodes accumulate into a larger narrative, the full story, of course, is in the book.
"The company evolved from permanent financial scarcity to market leadership and eventually to what appears today as near indispensability. The transition between each phase was marked by a significant crisis."
ASML always understood that its technology, and therefore the core of its competitive strength, originated from Philips. The alignment technology, the early pressure placed on Carl Zeiss AG, the guarantees and bridging finance when conditions became critical: these indispensable resources all came from the parent company.
At the same time, technology alone was not enough to achieve commercial success. For that, ASML had to develop its own model. On the one hand, the company relied heavily on Philips; on the other, it deliberately sought to become radically different in its market approach. It developed a logistics system that enabled a relatively small integrator to survive within a value chain dominated by much larger firms. Above all, the organizational culture needed to be different.
The chapter traces the evolution of this layered and sometimes paradoxical parent-daughter relationship across each phase. Later in the book, the Philips-ASML relationship becomes a case study in its own right.
Between the original 47 employees and the more than 44,000 of today lie five distinct phases, each building logically upon the previous one. The canon presented in this chapter reveals patterns that return throughout the book's more specialized chapters: the design of the business, the ecosystems in which ASML operated, decision-making under uncertainty, and the interplay between chance and necessity.
Readers working in organizations with long developmental trajectories of their own may find in this chapter a way to reconsider their own histories. Which early choices later proved foundational? What did crises teach the organization that could never have been learned otherwise? Which distinct phases can be identified in your own organization, and in which phase are you now? How do you build capabilities over time while preserving strategic flexibility?
Next week: Blog 9 turns to Chapter 3, where we examine what this sequence of crises left behind inside the company. We explore how early decisions and actions became imprinted, and how the four core rules of the original start-up continue to shape ASML today.
May 7, 2026
Blog 7 of 10 | On the Fifth Chapter of Lessons from ASML
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Last week, Susanne and I looked at how the semiconductor industry as a whole dealt with the collective uncertainty surrounding The Decision of the Century for the Next Generation of Lithography (NGL). This week, we zoom in on that same decision, but this time from Veldhoven.
M. C. Escher's Three Spheres II (1946) shows three spheres resting on a table. They appear identical, yet each reflects its surroundings differently, one mirrors the room, another is transparent, the third matte. We chose this image because it reflects what ASML faced in the late 1990s: three technological options, EUV, e-beam, and ion-beam, formally equal on the table, yet each reflecting a fundamentally different future.
To understand why this choice carried such weight for ASML, it helps to understand how the company was structured at the time. In the late 1990s, ASML was a young publicly listed company with essentially one product family and one business line: lithography machines. From a business perspective, that was unusual. Conventional wisdom favored diversification, related or unrelated, as a way to spread risk and protect shareholder value. ASML did the opposite, because the complexity of its technology demanded almost monomaniacal focus.
We return in Blog 8 and Chapter 2 to how that focus historically emerged. For now, what matters is what that focus implied for the NGL decision: there was no second pillar to fall back on. If ASML backed the wrong technology, there was no other part of the business capable of absorbing that mistake.
The chapter describes how ASML approached this choice through two complementary theoretical lenses.
The first is real options reasoning: behave like a trader in stock options. Buy time by making small commitments across multiple alternatives. Scale up only when both technological and economic evidence indicate that you are moving in the right direction.
The second perspective is scientific reasoning: treat every option as a hypothesis, make the critical assumptions explicit, and allow negative results to close off weaker paths.
Individually, both lenses fall short. Buying options alone leads to delay without necessarily generating new evidence. Experimentation alone can become expensive and directionless. Combined, however, they reinforce one another: experiments generate the information options require, while options logic determines how deeply to commit to each experiment.
One important element explored in Chapter 5, whose implications may not be immediately visible to everyone, is a management decision made in 1995. The decision expressed the ambition to internalize both IP registration and the development of an in-house research department. Until then, ASML had relied on Philips NatLab for fundamental research. But an internal research department was expected to answer the NGL question itself.
The rationale behind that shift was later summarized by the head of the department, Jos Benschop:
"Do not outsource this question. You can outsource the activities, but not how do I give an answer to the question. What will happen after optical lithography?"
The underlying message was clear: activities can be outsourced, but the foundation of such a strategic question belongs inside the organization, where the consequences of the answer ultimately fall. That decision made much of what followed in the chapter possible. ASML established separate experiments for each technology considered serious, always in environments where the strongest expertise was available. There was no early commitment to EUV; the portfolio deliberately remained broad for years, and only when evidence accumulated did the center of gravity gradually shift in that direction. The chapter describes in detail how these experiments were structured and which dynamics unfolded within them.
During the same period, Canon Inc. and Nikon applied similar reasoning. Both developed portfolios of NGL explorations: Canon through X-ray lithography, nanoimprint from 2001 onward, and EUV through the Japanese EUVA consortium; Nikon through e-beam, EUV, and the continued development of optical lithography. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, neither company was passive during this period.
When the financial crisis of 2008 arrived and the costs of EUV continued to rise, both companies decided to terminate their EUV programs. ASML's former chief scientist Bill Arnold recalled this matter-of-factly:
"Nikon and Canon as well, they both had EUV programs at one time and actually said we can't afford it."
The more interesting question is why the same options logic produced different outcomes. Part of the answer lies in the firms' structures themselves. At Canon, for example, lithography accounted for less than 10% of total revenue; there was a broader portfolio to fall back on. A diversified company withdrawing from an expensive technological race makes a reasonable decision within its own logic. A highly focused company making the same decision may no longer exist afterward.
Next week: Blog 8 turns to Chapter 2, forty years of ASML in five acts, including the historical roots of that one-product focus.
Curious about the full story?
Pre-order Lessons Learned from ASML (Lannoo Campus, 2026) now - it will be on its way to you soon.
April 30, 2026
Blog 6 of 10 | On the Fourth Chapter of Lessons from ASML
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Last week, we focused on four audiences: managers in innovative environments, deep-tech founders, executives of large organizations, and policymakers, and asked what the patterns described in this book might mean for each of them. Despite the discomfort of the limited generalizability of context-specific patterns, Susanne and I still attempted to build that bridge. We are now past the halfway point and counting down to the publication date. The coming blogs will move closer to the substance of ASML itself. We begin, however, at the meta level: with the semiconductor industry as a whole.
M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands (1948) shows two hands drawing each other. Neither exists without the other. We chose this image because it captures what was at play in the semiconductor industry of the late 1990s: a situation in which chipmakers, equipment manufacturers, material suppliers, and research institutions could not independently solve the central challenge of that period. The problem was too large for any single player to make meaningful progress alone.
Uncertainty is a familiar theme in the literature on strategy and innovation. But there is a difference between a firm navigating its own uncertainty and an industry collectively not knowing which direction to take. In the latter case, not only does the dominant technology shift, but the entire framework through which the market is defined becomes unstable. What good enough means is contested, as is who has the authority to define it.
That was the situation in the semiconductor industry at the end of the twentieth century. The existing technology of optical lithography seemed to be approaching its physical limits. The urgency to find a successor technology was high, yet it was clear that this would require a collective choice. Any candidate technology would only succeed if the entire value chain could move along with it: light sources, masks, materials, and production equipment all needed to evolve in parallel. Each link had to develop simultaneously, and no single party could finance or validate this on its own.
"What 'good enough' means is contested - as is who has the authority to define it."
Within the industry, this was referred to as The Decision of the Century. There was significant time pressure: if possible, the choice of a new technology had to be made before the end of the twentieth century. The investments required to bring any candidate technology to production readiness were so substantial in the late 1990s that the industry could not afford to fully pursue multiple paths in parallel. Only one could ultimately prevail, and the entire supply chain, masks, materials, and metrology equipment, needed to align behind that choice.
What emerged was a structured collective process. Every six months, the champions of all candidate technologies convened. In the audience were around one hundred experts: chipmakers, equipment manufacturers, and materials specialists. The different technology consortia presented their progress to the same room, and at the end, a vote was taken on which technology appeared most viable. Those unable to demonstrate sufficient progress lost votes, attention, and funding. Early voting outcomes moved in a direction that almost no one had anticipated. In the chapter, we describe in detail how this process unfolded.
Participants described this process as technology-driven. And indeed, the mechanisms were designed as such: comparability, transparency, discipline, and consortia focused on technological experimentation. But those who read this chapter may also recognize something else: the collective and interpersonal dimension of decision-making.
Hannah Arendt described politics not as governance or lobbying, but as the space that emerges when people speak and act together: a shared arena in which individuals appear as distinct actors, exchange arguments, and initiate something new. Power, in her sense, is not possessed by individuals; it arises between people who act together, and exists only as long as that collective action continues. The binding force of a collective decision, in this view, does not derive from technical correctness, but from the fact that people have acted together within that space.
"The binding force of a collective decision does not derive from technical correctness, but from the fact that people have acted together within that space."
SEMATECH created precisely such a space. The shared roadmap it developed and used as a collective guide derived its authority not primarily from representing the technically correct path, but from having been shaped collectively by the industry. It emerged in an arena where no single participant, regardless of size or power, could fully control the outcome. Socio-economic interests, geopolitical context, and questions of legitimacy all played a role alongside technical considerations.
Next week: we zoom in on ASML itself, how the company navigated that same decision as an individual actor, with its own technological portfolio and trade-offs.
Curious about the full story?
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April 23, 2026
Blog 5 of 10 | On the Ninth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
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For this blog, Susanne and I chose M. C. Escher's Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935). He holds up a reflective sphere and sees himself: the room, the windows, his own face at the center. What you see depends on where you stand. That is also the premise of Chapter 9: we reverse the analytical lens - from ASML to the reader.
For eight chapters, the book has focused on one company: forty years of choices made under conditions that no one fully understood at the time. The imprints formed in the early years continued to shape decision-making long after they were consciously recognized. Ecosystems emerged through a specific combination of necessity, institutional legacy, and timing that cannot be engineered. And strategic options were explored step by step, refined over time, and, when evidence pointed in a direction, deepened or abandoned.
In Chapter 9, we take a different approach. We step away from ASML and carefully connect this material to the reader's context. Writing this chapter came with hesitation. Throughout the book, we have aimed to offer observations and questions rather than impose conclusions: no step-by-step plans, no concrete tips, no synthesis that replaces the reader's own thinking. We know the context of ASML, but not that of the reader. And we are acutely aware of how context-specific strategic decision-making is: what worked in Veldhoven worked there, under those conditions, with those people, in that specific sequence of events. As Gjalt Smit notes in the opening pages of the book: this is not a recipe that can simply be copied.
"Gjalt Smit already says it in the opening pages of the book: this is not a recipe that can simply be copied."
At the same time, avoiding any attempt to build a bridge to other contexts also feels insufficient, a way of stepping aside rather than enabling broader impact and dialogue. If the lenses we applied across eight chapters do not connect beyond ASML, why read them at all? This becomes even more relevant as we increasingly shift attention from the main title Lessons Learned from ASML to the subtitle Building and Sustaining Innovativeness under Uncertainty, a topic that is particularly timely in the Dutch context. It also resonates with the current role of Peter Wennink, who now applies lessons from ASML to the broader economy and calls for decisive innovation and investment in uncertain times.
In an effort to build that bridge, we wrote this chapter with four audiences in mind: managers in innovative environments, founders and CEOs of deep-tech start-ups and scale-ups, executives of established organizations, and policymakers, each with their own time horizons, degrees of freedom, and blind spots. We link each group to the theoretical lenses we consider most relevant to their perspective, without claiming exclusivity.
For managers, the question is how to design an organization in which unexpected insights have a chance to take root. While keeping all balls in the air today, you must also create space for what comes next, fully aware of how rarely those ambitions coexist without tension. In such a context, how do you build the conditions for serendipity, rather than missing it because the agenda is full? And how do you develop routines that allow new opportunities to move beyond the initial phase and become part of the organization's collective capability? Within that space, how do you ensure clarity in choices, roles, interfaces, and the smooth flow of knowledge and new insights?
We then turn to founders and CEOs of deep-tech companies, operating in a world where development cycles are typically longer and riskier than the patience and risk appetite of investors. Here, we examine strategic options and the scientific approach: how to stay engaged with multiple possible futures without assuming the outcome. ASML's long-term investments in parallel technological trajectories, DUV and EUV side by side, are informative, but also potentially misleading: they suggest a level of patience and scale that most founders do not have. For that reason, the chapter focuses on the underlying mechanisms that also work at smaller scales.
We then look at the challenge faced by executives in established organizations: how to make an organization with a rich past resilient in a turbulent future. This involves not only managing strategy, KPIs, and market expectations, but also an inherited set of organizational reflexes, some still valuable, others experienced as ballast. For them, we explore the role of imprints and sensitive periods: how to make deeply embedded patterns visible and assess whether they still serve their original purpose. And how to use moments of turbulence to deliberately steer the organization's DNA in a more adaptive direction.
Finally, we turn to policymakers working on innovation and industrial policy. This is the most politically charged part of the book, written in the autumn of 2025 in the Netherlands, at a time when terms such as strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty dominate public debate. The chapter takes that urgency seriously and poses a sharp question:
"Peter Wennink has often warned against the dream of becoming a chokepoint in a supply chain as an end in itself. In his view, it is healthier to aim for mutual dependencies: being important enough that others have a stake in your success, but not so dominant that you turn into a permanent geopolitical pressure point."
We therefore explore collective action and the geopolitical dimension of high-tech development: what the semiconductor industry reveals about organizing shared uncertainty without undermining competitiveness. And how technological complexity creates a fine-grained web of interdependencies across global value chains, while local historical context continues to shape where regions can truly excel.
The ambition of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is to make patterns recognizable rather than prescribe a path. To raise questions that help the reader move forward from their own position, rather than from ours.
"If something here matched an intuition you already had, perhaps it simply gave it a name. Recognition can be enough for momentum to form: a shared word, a clearer connection, a decision taken at the right level."
Whether we succeeded, we will only know when readers tell us.
Next week: collective action to jointly build the individual competitiveness of the future, on the dynamics of innovation ecosystems.
April 16, 2026
Blog 4 of 10 | On the Eighth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
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The Escher print we selected for this chapter is Three Worlds (1955). Three layers are visible simultaneously on the same water surface: fallen leaves floating, bare trees reflected, and deep below, a fish that appears both in the foreground and the background at once. Each of these layers follows its own logic, yet together they express something none of them can convey individually. It felt like a fitting image for the chapter that demanded the most from us to write.
In the seven chapters before this, Susanne and I could comfortably stay behind empirical data, theory, or a combination of both. Here, that is no longer possible. This chapter is personal: two people who, after years of research and practice, offer their own take-away or modest perspective, fully aware that entire libraries exist on the themes we touch upon. Whether it succeeds is left to the reader.
M.C. Escher's Three Worlds (1955), different perspectives that together form a system, each with its own logic.
We do not know how many management books we will write in our lives. It is quite possible that this, alongside all our other activities, will be our most ambitious one, simply because spending another fifteen years on something similar seems unlikely. With that realization came a conviction: if you tell this story, and you also have something to say about how you think, then this is the moment. Opportunities like this rarely come twice.
So yes, the combination of perspectives in this chapter is truly our own construct. That makes it all the more exciting to share, especially because we try to do so as fully and concisely as possible, while each perspective contains an entire world behind it. The spectrum we cover is broad: from the highly rational and systematic to the almost intangible. This is intentional because innovation under uncertainty requires both, even if they are difficult to articulate simultaneously.
The motivation behind this chapter extends beyond ASML. We would like to see more organizations develop the decisiveness and learning capacity that ASML has built. At the same time, we see that the reality in many organizations is far removed from how ASML operates. Embedding such innovative capacity more deeply begins with an integrated view of the organization itself: the futures it envisions, the assumptions underlying those futures, and what is actually required to realize them. We wrote this as an invitation to examine one's own situation through multiple lenses at once, without resorting to ready-made formulas.
The question that occupies both of us is how to formulate a strategy that provides direction yet remains adaptable in an uncertain context, and how to translate that into practice in organizations made up of real people, each with their own views, fears, interests, commitments, and insights. How do you create something that works at the level of the organization, the groups within it, and the individual?
One perspective approaches this question through three instruments, applied as an integrated learning cycle: scenario planning to keep multiple plausible futures alive, Discovery-Driven Planning to make underlying assumptions explicit and testable, and scientific experimentation to actively test those assumptions while uncertainty is still unresolved. Together, they describe a way of working he calls disciplined readiness: preparing, screening futures, and delaying commitment until a choice becomes necessary and confidence has grown sufficiently to make it.
"It is simple; you eat an elephant in small pieces. So there was a program which always had a horizon of a couple of years ahead. And then there was a deliverable or an intended deliverable that never came because we found a hurdle that we could not jump. And then you have a new two-year program ahead."
- Erik Loopstra, ASML Fellow
That pattern, defining possible horizons, testing them, hitting a wall, and starting again, is what innovative strategy looks like in practice. Far less linear than it appears in a book, as we know all too well.
Susanne's perspective starts from a different but related question: how does strategic intent travel through an organization? How do you anchor a sound plan in a complex reality? She works with three intertwined layers, each with its own systemic perspective.
The systems engineering layer asks what the whole must deliver, how to structure it, and where the explicit trade-offs lie. The systems dynamics layer asks which flows and feedback loops determine whether the organization responds to change in a learning-oriented way, and how intended loops relate to everyday behavior. And then there is the systemic layer of the human undercurrent: the less visible domain of connection, order, and balance, the fears, loyalties, and status dynamics that can reinforce or quietly undermine formal structures.
That third layer is often considered soft, yet it is precisely what explains why two organizations with very similar strategies and structures can perform so differently. You may choose not to devote time and attention to it, but it develops regardless and affects an organization's capacity and innovativeness.
"The hope is simple: that these pages help bring strategy, scenarios, structure, flows, and undercurrents into the same line, so that innovativeness travels beyond pitches, post-its, pilots, and PowerPoint and into how work is done."
That is the promise this chapter seeks to deliver, fully aware that it may come across as complex. Sustainable innovativeness only emerges when it becomes an integral part of the organization, and its development therefore requires a systematic approach. With this chapter, we aim to offer a clearer view of how that bridges strategic ambition and organizational reality.
Next week: What does all of this actually mean if you are the one making the decisions?
April 8, 2026
Blog 3 of 10 | On the Seventh Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
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ASML is an exceptionally specific company. The technology, the sector, the scale, the geopolitical position - few industries in the world lend themselves to easy comparison. And yet, we are writing a book that aims to offer lessons that extend beyond Veldhoven. How do you do that without losing specificity, or diluting the insights into platitudes?
That is the question this chapter addresses directly. Our approach is to zoom out - to move one level higher and survey the terrain before making claims about what can be learned.
The Escher print for this blog is Belvedere (1958). A figure climbs to the upper gallery of an architecturally impossible building to overlook the landscape. At each level, the construction holds; only the whole refuses to make sense.
How do you learn from such a story? By stepping above the story itself, making visible patterns that remain hidden at ground level, while staying explicit about the limits of what can be seen from any given vantage point. Every theoretical lens has its value - but combining too many risks obscuring rather than clarifying.
M.C. Escher's Belvedere (1958), a more far-reaching perspective from a higher vantage point.
Martin van den Brink, former CTO and Co-President of ASML, puts it bluntly:
"What we said to have as a strategy in the first ten years is that we are going to be light... At the time, it was no strategy at all; you had no money and no capability. So the only thing we could do was to go to suppliers... There is a completely different dynamic in a time in which you developed a strategy than when you start looking back."
This is precisely the pitfall the chapter seeks to avoid. Retrospective accounts of success tend to produce coherent narratives. But the patterns that truly mattered rarely resemble the patterns that, in hindsight, appear deliberately chosen.
Theoretical lenses help make underlying mechanisms visible - not to construct better stories about the past, but to understand which structures are transferable beyond ASML, and where that transfer breaks down. That is the objective of this chapter: not to retell the story, but to surface the mechanisms beneath it and specify the conditions under which they apply elsewhere.
The chapter approaches the ASML story along multiple axes. No single perspective captures the whole; each highlights a different dimension.
One axis runs from the individual to the ecosystem. Some patterns are visible at the organizational level - how early choices about structure and supplier relationships persist over decades, how crises are converted into learning moments. Others only emerge when zooming out: how industries organize shared uncertainty, and how competitors collaborate to stabilize the playing field without relinquishing strategic autonomy. These levels are interdependent - what an organization can do depends on what the ecosystem allows, and vice versa.
A second axis runs from past to future. Early choices leave imprints that extend beyond deliberate strategy and are difficult to reverse. Yet moments of revision do occur - typically during crises, technological discontinuities, or leadership transitions. These are sensitive periods, when what once appeared fixed becomes temporarily fluid. Understanding the past is therefore not a historical exercise, but a strategic capability for shaping the future.
A third axis concerns uncertainty itself. There is the fog of technological ferment - when multiple paths appear plausible and established decision anchors lose their grip. There is the uncertainty of interdependence. And there is the uncertainty of chance, discussed in the previous blog. Each requires a different response; conflating them is costly.
Finally, there is the relationship between change and stability. How do you incorporate evolving insight while maintaining a direction that remains actionable? The chapter does not offer a formula, but it does offer a way of seeing - and that distinction matters.
"The value lies in what a good lens always offers: a way of seeing that can be tested, adapted, or set aside with reasons."
This is the chapter with the figures. Conceptual models that condense patterns that would otherwise require pages of prose. No self-respecting management book avoids presenting an all-explaining matrix - so we have included one as well.
At the same time, the figures provide structure for each theoretical lens: which elements matter, and how they relate. The lenses are related, but combining too many at once blurs the view and makes it harder to identify what is essential.
You will find these figures in the book - where they can be read in the context of the narrative that precedes them.
Returning to the initial question: how do you learn from a story that resists comparison? Looking only for similarities is insufficient. More productive is to isolate mechanisms that operate beyond the specific context - and to clearly define where analogy no longer holds.
"The ASML story functions as a magnifying glass, not a mirror."
It does not show what your organization looks like; it clarifies which questions are worth asking. From the Belvedere, you see further.
Next week: a look into the chapter we found most challenging to write - on strategy, systems, and the things that can only be sensed.
April 1, 2026
Blog 2 of 10 | On the Sixth Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
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Last week, we concluded that ASML's trajectory can be well explained in hindsight, but its success was not as inevitable as we might now assume. That gap between explanatory logic and the reality of how things actually unfolded is what this chapter explores further. Where many management books explain how good management and leadership contribute to organizational success, here we explain success through factors that lie largely outside ASML's sphere of influence.
The Escher print we selected for this blog is Relativity (1953). Figures move through the same architecture, but each within their own gravitational field. They cross the same staircases, pass the same arches, yet perceive the space entirely differently. Who you are and where you start determine which route you see, but they also determine who you encounter, what coincides, and which connections emerge that no one had anticipated. This image fits the questions we raise in this chapter.
"Who you are and where you start determine which route you see; but it also determines who you encounter, what happens to coincide, and which connections emerge that no one had anticipated."
Gjalt Smit, ASML's first CEO, wrote a manuscript after his tenure about the early years of the company that was never published. He titled it Chance and Necessity, after the work of biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod. Monod argued that random, unplanned events lie at the basis of every breakthrough, and that necessity - the structured response to those events - turns them into something enduring. Smit recognized that pattern in what he himself had experienced. The major unexpected turns in ASML's early years he described as "acts of God." Not to downplay his own role, but because he knew that several of the major plot twists lay far outside his sphere of influence.
The role of chance, luck, and serendipity is increasingly taken seriously in the management literature as an explanatory factor for strategic success, although practice, as usual, has been ahead of theory for much longer. The tendency to retrospectively construct a strategy that neatly explains why something worked remains persistent. Anyone who looks closely at the history of organizations that have achieved something extraordinary sees that luck and misfortune play a more substantial role than we usually acknowledge. We do not present it as the sole explanation for success or as an excuse for failure, but as a factor that deserves to be taken just as seriously as the quality of management and leadership.
"The major unexpected turns in ASML's early years he described as 'acts of God.' Not to downplay his own role, but because he knew that several of the major plot twists lay far outside his sphere of influence."
Chance is the unexpected event itself - it is neither intended nor designed. Luck, or misfortune, is how that event falls on you, which depends on where you stand at that moment and what you have already built. Serendipity is the third concept, and the most useful in practice: the ability to recognize the unexpected and make something of it, because you were prepared to see what there was to see. Three closely related concepts that are often lumped together under the umbrella of coincidence or luck, but that describe fundamentally different things. And that each require a different managerial response.
One of the most striking passages in this chapter is not about internal decisions, but about the geopolitical constellation in which ASML was able to grow. Not the recent discussions about export restrictions and EUV - those are the subject of other books - but the slower, less visible structures that had already drawn the map long before ASML had sold even a single machine.
ASML began in a world in which tensions between the United States and Japan over trade policy and market share in the semiconductor industry were decisive. Who you were, and where you came from in that field of forces - trusted or suspect, neutral or politically burdened - determined which paths were accessible and who had an interest in working with you. A relatively small Dutch company, far from the centers of power, turned out in that context to be an unexpectedly useful partner for organizations seeking a non-Japanese alternative, or those preferring to work with someone outside the trade-policy frontlines. No one in Veldhoven had influence over how that context had come into being. But the map was already there, and who you met along the way - and which doors opened - was partly determined by it.
Using a number of concrete ASML episodes - which we will not reveal here, but which range from a travel ban during the Gulf War that nearly cost a critical contract, to a forgotten design choice that years later turned out to be the key to a major technological advantage - we show how random circumstances were turned into durable strengths.
But the chapter does not stop there. The central question is not only what happened by chance, but how ASML as an organization was structured to make something of that chance. What the episodes have in common is a structural response: an organization that was lightly built, modular in design, and that shared information quickly across internal and external boundaries. This made it possible to absorb the unexpected and act on it before the window closed. These organizational characteristics turned out to determine whether a random event remained a risk or became a springboard.
"Chance throws the dice. But Necessity - the structured, prepared response - determines what is made of the outcome."
Next week: how we use theoretical lenses to lift the ASML story beyond the boundaries of a single firm - and in doing so sharpen your own perspective on innovation under uncertain conditions.
March 26, 2026
Blog 1 of 10 | On the First Chapter of Lessons Learned from ASML
Today, we start a series of ten weekly blogs, together with Susanne van der Velden, leading up to the publication of our co-authored book, Lessons Learned from ASML - Building and Sustaining Innovativeness under Uncertainty, to be released this spring by Lannoo Campus.
Each blog previews a chapter. We pair the series with lithographs by M. C. Escher - a deliberate choice. Escher worked in lithography, the same printmaking technique that underpins the semiconductor chips on which the digital world runs. More importantly, his work invites a way of seeing we aim to cultivate in this book: holding multiple layers at once and staying with the tension between local logic and the seemingly impossible whole that ASML represents.
This week's lithograph, Waterfall (1961), shows water flowing toward a mill, falling downward, and then somehow rising again on the other side of the aqueduct to begin the cycle anew. Escher built it from three Penrose triangles, each individually geometrically correct, together forming a closed loop that cannot exist in three dimensions. The image stays with us because we recognize something in it about how people engage with the impossible: mathematical precision in service of human imagination. That interplay is also key to the story this book tells about ASML.
"Making the impossible possible was a recurring maxim within ASML."
EUV lithography - the technology with which ASML today helps produce the world's most advanced chips - uses light of 13.5 nanometers, guided via mirrors with a maximum deviation of less than 0.02 nanometers. To put that in perspective: if you scaled that mirror surface up to the size of the Dutch province of Brabant, the largest imperfection across the entire surface would be a ten-centimeter sidewalk bump.
At ASML, technological progress is not just a means to a commercial end; it effectively becomes the organizing principle of the firm. Building the next machine, reaching the next wavelength, and enabling the next generation so that customers can keep improving their own processes - that is the organization's deepest drive, and it has never fundamentally changed. Which is precisely why it is so instructive to understand how that technological foundation was laid and sustained: under turbulent conditions, as markets collapsed, shareholders doubted, and competitors made different choices. Behind every technological plateau are people who chose a direction at decisive moments, entered into collaborations, and persisted when doing so was, rationally speaking, far from obviously the right call. The mechanisms behind those decisions and that commitment are what this book seeks to illuminate.
That deeper inquiry is why we wrote this book. ASML's success is already well documented; what we sought to understand is how innovative capacity is built and sustained when uncertainty is not temporary, but persistent. ASML started on 1 April 1984 with 47 employees in wooden barracks on the Philips campus in Eindhoven, last in a field of seven competitors. Customers were skeptical, the parent company doubted, and the market collapsed in the very first year. The choices made in that period accumulated over four decades into something that, in retrospect, looks inevitable - but never was.
We spent more than ten years on this research, in archives and in conversations with dozens of people inside and outside ASML, repeatedly holding those insights up against what the management sciences have to say on comparable questions. The guiding principle throughout was the same: when the data contradicted the tidy story, the story had to change.
"We wrote this book to make it more broadly accessible how innovative capacity is built and sustained when uncertainty is not a temporary condition but a permanent one."
The first chapter establishes the terrain before the story begins. A few things readers will encounter:
A concise guide to lithography, written in part from the expertise of Martin van den Brink, former CTO and Co-President of ASML and the technological architect behind the EUV breakthrough. Together with us, he explains - without assuming the reader is at home in optical physics - why reducing the images projected onto customers' wafers as precisely as possible is at the core of everything ASML does, and what that demands of engineering. It is the technical context needed to follow the strategic choices examined in the chapters that follow.
That is followed by a first exploration of something paradoxical within ASML: despite being the de facto sole supplier of the world's most advanced lithography machines, the word 'monopolist' is forbidden internally - not as a symbolic gesture, but as a genuine conviction. Being the only supplier in an interdependent supply chain does not automatically confer greater power; customers ultimately determine what needs to be done, and any form of complacency carries existential risk. That posture - treating dominance as fragility - calls for explanation, and this chapter provides it.
Finally, we sketch a picture of just how volatile the semiconductor market truly is. On average, the sector lost more than a fifth of its revenues in each downturn cycle over the past forty years, sometimes within the space of months. For a company that is fully operational and must swing rapidly between steep scale-ups and sharp downturns - while simultaneously keeping high-risk, long-horizon R&D programs running - this creates a permanent tension between technological ambition, financial manageability, and organizational flexibility. Understanding what that tension looks like is a precondition for appreciating the choices examined throughout the rest of the book.
Next week: the role of chance, luck, and contingency as explanatory factors in sustained innovation and success.