Theologians used the word for three centuries before a businessman touched it.
The word "synergy" entered English in the 1650s from the New Latin synergia, drawn from the Greek synergeia, meaning cooperation or working together.1 The Greek roots are syn (together) and ergon (work). For its first three centuries in English, the word belonged almost exclusively to theology and medicine.
In theology, "synergism" described the doctrine that human will cooperates with divine grace in the work of salvation, a position debated between Lutherans and their critics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 In physiology, the word described the cooperative action of muscles or drugs working together to produce an effect greater than either would produce alone.
R. Buckminster Fuller used "synergy" in the 1960s to describe systems in which the behavior of the whole cannot be predicted by examining the parts separately. His usage gave the word scientific legitimacy outside medicine.3
Igor Ansoff brought the word into corporate strategy in his 1965 book Corporate Strategy, using it to describe the additional value created when two business units combine.4 By the 1990s, "synergy" had become the most overused word in mergers and acquisitions, invoked to justify deals that often destroyed more value than they created. A 2004 study by KPMG found that 83% of mergers failed to increase shareholder value, despite synergy being cited as the primary rationale in most of them.5