Strategy

The word "strategy" entered English around 1810, borrowed from the French stratégie, which came directly from the Greek strategia, meaning the office or command of a general.1 The Greek compound strategos combined stratos, meaning army, with agein, meaning to lead. A strategos was an elected general in Athens, a position that combined military and political authority.

In classical Athens, Cleisthenes reformed the office in 501 BC, establishing a board of ten strategoi elected annually by the citizen assembly. The office was held by Pericles, Themistocles, and other leaders whose authority rested on both battlefield command and political legitimacy.2

No ancient Greek actually used the word "strategy" as it is used today. The closest equivalents would have been strategike episteme, meaning the general's knowledge, or strategon sophia, the general's wisdom.3

Carl von Clausewitz gave the word its modern military definition in On War, published in 1832, distinguishing strategy from tactics. Strategy, he wrote, concerned the use of engagements to achieve the objectives of the war, while tactics concerned the use of forces within engagements.4

The word entered business vocabulary in the mid-twentieth century. Kenneth Andrews at Harvard Business School helped establish corporate strategy as an academic field in the 1960s, and Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy, published in 1980, gave the term its dominant business framework.5 The word that once described the knowledge required to lead an army now describes the knowledge required to lead a quarterly earnings call.