Strategy

• 1. Introduction

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  Strategy takes its name from the Greek word stratēgia, meaning "troop leadership" or "office of general." The term entered Eastern Roman military vocabulary in the 6th century, yet it would not reach Western European languages until the 18th century. That gap of more than a thousand years tells you something: strategy was for a long time a specialized art, reserved for commanders who moved armies across continents. What changed to make it a concept that now governs businesses, governments, and even counterterrorism agencies? And what exactly are people agreeing on when they use the word at all?

• 2. The General's Art

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  Carl von Clausewitz, whom scholars credit as the father of Western modern strategic study, defined military strategy as "the employment of battles to gain the end of war." B. H. Liddell Hart took a softer view, emphasizing "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." Both men, despite their differences, shared one conviction: political aims must take priority over military goals. U.S. Naval War College instructor Andrew Wilson captured this relationship plainly, calling strategy the "process by which political purpose is translated into military action." Eastern military philosophy arrived at similar conclusions far earlier. Sun Tzu's The Art of War is dated around 500 B.C., predating the Greek etymology by centuries. Lawrence Freedman offered the most compressed definition of all, calling strategy "the art of creating power." From the quotation at the head of this documentary's tradition sits Clausewitz's own observation that "policy is the guiding intelligence, and war only the instrument, not vice-versa."

• 3. Five Faces of Strategy

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  Henry Mintzberg of McGill University proposed, in 1998, that strategy does not have a single face. He identified five complementary definitions, each capturing something the others miss. Strategy as plan is the most familiar: a directed course of action aimed at an intended set of goals. Strategy as pattern looks backward rather than forward, identifying a consistent track record of behavior realized over time rather than designed in advance. When a realized pattern diverges from original intent, Mintzberg called that emergent strategy. Strategy as position locates brands, products, or companies within a market, shaped primarily by forces outside the firm. Strategy as ploy is the narrowest form, a specific maneuver designed to outwit a single competitor. Strategy as perspective is the most philosophical: acting from a "theory of the business" or from the ideological mindset of the organization itself. Mintzberg also proposed, separately from these five, that strategy is best understood as "a pattern in a stream of decisions," setting that view against the assumption that strategy is always a deliberate plan.

• 4. The Business Turn

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  Modern business strategy emerged as a recognized field of study only in the 1960s. Before that decade, the words "strategy" and "competition" rarely appeared in the prominent management literature at all. Alfred Chandler, writing in 1962, defined strategy as "the determination of the basic long-term goals of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals." Michael Porter, writing in 1980, extended the definition to a "broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry out those goals." Porter also framed it as a combination of ends and the means by which those ends are pursued. Max McKeown argued in 2011 that strategy is fundamentally "about shaping the future" and represents the human attempt to reach "desirable ends with available means." Vladimir Kvint went further, defining strategy as "a system of finding, formulating, and developing a doctrine that will ensure long-term success if followed faithfully."

• 5. Structure of a Good Strategy

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  Professor Richard P. Rumelt, writing in 2011, described strategy as a type of problem solving built around a structure he called the kernel. The kernel has exactly three parts: a diagnosis that defines the nature of the challenge; a guiding policy for dealing with it; and coherent actions designed to carry that policy out. To illustrate, Rumelt pointed to President Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis address of the 22nd of October 1962. Kennedy's diagnosis named the discovery of Soviet offensive missile sites being prepared on Cuba. His guiding policy was an "unswerving objective" to prevent those missiles from being used and to secure their removal. His action plan began with a "strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba." Rumelt also argued in 2011 that three aspects of strategy are particularly important: premeditation, the anticipation of others' behavior, and the purposeful design of coordinated actions. Strategy, for Rumelt, was less a plan or choice than a design problem requiring trade-offs among elements that must be arranged, adjusted, and coordinated. Bruce Henderson, writing in 1981, added that strategy depends on "the ability to foresee future consequences of present initiatives" and that finite resources and uncertainty about an adversary's intentions make it valuable in the first place.

• 6. Complexity and Symbiosis

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  R. D. Stacey applied complexity science to strategy, arguing that the field needs a framework capable of bringing emergent and deliberate strategies together. In complexity theory, strategy is tied directly to action rather than to pre-set programs; those programs are seen as effective only in highly ordered environments with little chaos. Strategy, by contrast, emerges from examining both determined conditions and uncertainties at the same time. Stacey applied principles of self-organization and chaos to describe strategy, organizational change, and learning. He argued that corrections of anomalies happen through negative feedback, while innovation and continuous change come from positive feedback. Terra and Passador developed this into a model they called Symbiotic Dynamics, conceiving the organization as two intertwined systems in a symbiotic relationship with each other and with the external environment. One system is the social network, acting as a self-referential entity that controls organizational life. The other is a technical structure resembling a purposeful machine that processes resources. Terra and Passador concluded that organizations which intervene to maintain environmental stability within parameters suitable for their own survival tend to exhibit greater longevity, because producing organizations also contribute to environmental entropy, which can lead to abrupt collapses even within the organizations themselves.

• 7. Strategy Against Terror

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  Counterterrorism presents a particular version of the coordination problem that complexity theorists describe. Because it involves synchronized efforts among numerous competing bureaucratic entities, national governments developed overarching national-level strategies specifically to manage that tension. The United States produced several such documents across the war on terror: the National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism in 2003, the Obama-era National Strategy for Counterterrorism in 2011, and the United States National Strategy for Counterterrorism in 2018. Supporting plans included the 2014 Strategy to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the 2016 Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States. The United Kingdom's counterterrorism strategy, called CONTEST, set its goal as reducing "the risk to the UK and its citizens and interests overseas from terrorism so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence." The 2016 plan's focus on local partners reflects the broader strategic insight that Burnett identified: effective strategy encompasses not only goal formulation and implementation, but environmental analysis, evaluation, and ongoing control as well.