Toward an Ontology of Strategy in an Enterprise Context

Background

Strategy is distinct from two other concepts that also have their roots in war. For the Greeks and Byzantines, “strategy” or stratēgia episteme loosely meant “what generals think about” or, “the knowledge of generals” (Luttwak, 2002, p. 267), that is about what it takes to win a war, whereas “tactics” referred to the effective use of resources, that is what is involved in the orderly organisation and manoeuvre of troops to win a battle (Freedman, 1985. The bridging concept “operational planning” (Simpson & Weiner, 1989) is often included to address the mapping required to align what happened in the world of strategic and the world of tactics. (Porter 1979), Ashcroft (1965), and of course, Ohmae (1988) integrated these ideas into business thinking.

While there is not much clarity in the historical writing on this subject (Marston & Leahy, 2016), a current definition of (military) strategy sees it as follows: