What is Strategy?

A practical definition that combines position and movement, artifact and activity

“Strategy” has a problem. It’s a term that’s often used, and misused, without a clear definition or a shared understanding. Here’s a practical definition that recognizes the importance of position and planning, while also honoring the significance of movement and adaptation, which is essential for dealing well with change, uncertainty, and the unexpected.

A Brief History

The word strategy comes from the Ancient Greek:

• Stratēgós (στρατηγός), a noun meaning “general or commander of an army”, and

• Stratēgéō (στρατηγέω), a verb meaning “to be a general; to command an army; to conduct a campaign”

In warfare, strategy defined where and when to fight, articulated a path to victory, and shaped the course of conflict. Over time, the term moved from the battlefield to business, politics, and beyond.

Yet, the original intent still applies: strategy is about making choices and taking action to achieve favorable outcomes.

What Strategy is Not

Strategy is frequently confused with common components of a strategy.

Strategy is not a bold mission, a grandiose vision, or ambitious goals. It’s not inspirational leadership or shared values. It’s not a dashboard of OKRs and KPIs. It’s not a budget, an operating plan, or a laundry list of actions.

These may be elements of a strategy. But they miss the essence of strategy.

A Working Definition

Here’s a simple definition that I have found useful and broadly applicable:

Strategy is a coherent set of choices and actions
that position you to accomplish an important goal.

Let’s break that down.

Defining the goal

Every strategy requires a clear aim. What are you trying to accomplish? What is your primary goal?

In business, that requires understanding the landscape. Where are you now? What’s going on in your business and market? What’s changing?

It also means defining a vision of the future that’s ambitious, achievable, and worth pursuing. Where are you going? What will it take to succeed? What critical risks and challenges must be overcome?

Clarifying priorities (position to win)

Strategy requires prioritization. Not everything is equally important or equally urgent.

Which challenges must be overcome to accomplish your goal? Which ones can be acted upon now? Which demand immediate focus?

Which pivot points would create the most leverage? How can you position yourself to take advantage of change and uncertainty and avoid being blindsided or paralyzed?

In short, what matters most, today?

Deciding coherent action

Strategy is not one big decision or action. It’s a set, or portfolio, of actions and initiatives.

Coherence is essential. Decisions and actions need to align and reinforce each other. You want your teams rowing together to move you from the current position towards the desired one.

In business, you must decide: Where and how will you compete? Who will you serve… and NOT serve? What will you do… and NOT do? Constraints and tradeoffs need to be recognized and reconciled.

Strategy is Dynamic

So far our definition emphasizes position, with a connotation that can suggest something that’s fixed, final, or long-term. Yet, strategy is generally practiced in an environment of high complexity, rapid change, and considerable uncertainty. Even the best strategies are subject to change and disruption, sooner or later, and often in unexpected ways. As former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said:

“Everyone has a plan — until they get punched in the mouth.”

There’s a clue to the problem that’s buried in the language itself. The ancient Greeks had a verb form for strategy (stratēgéō), to actively command a campaign in motion. English adopted only the noun. You can plan, position, and maneuver, but you cannot strategy. The language treats strategy as a thing you have, not a thing you do. This creates a subtle bias toward the static, which can be limiting, even dangerous.

Hence, it is useful to think of strategy as a combination of position (static) and movement (dynamic). In this context, strategy is about dealing well with uncertainty. It’s about sensing, responding to, and initiating change. It’s about experimenting, learning, and adapting in order to discover promising new paths. And it’s about doing so faster than the market or the competition.

Think of change as waves: the key is to see them coming, ride the ones you can catch, make a few of your own, and keep the dangerous ones from destroying you.

An Expanded Definition

With this broader context in mind, we can expand our definition of strategy:

(1) A coherent set of choices and actions
that position you to accomplish an important goal.

(2) The act of sensing, responding to, and initiating change,
in order to build resilience and to discover and exploit promising ways forward.

Let’s break that down.

Sensing change

You can’t respond to a wave you don’t see coming. So dynamic strategy starts with information. Information can come from both internal and external sources.

To improve internal sources, consider how you can reduce barriers to information flow. How many layers exist in your corporate hierarchy between the front line and the decision? How pronounced are silos in your organization? Andy Grove (Intel’s former CEO and a long-time Stanford faculty member) used to tell students:

“Information deteriorates as it moves up the hierarchy. Even in the best leadership teams, you have at least 10% signal loss across layers.”

Grove’s remedy was to get unfiltered signal directly from the front lines, from engineers, salespeople, production staff, etc.

Information can come from both public and proprietary sources. You don’t want to rely just on public information. Everyone has it, so it rarely confers an edge. If you can create private or proprietary sources of information, data and insight that only you possess, you can generate real advantage.

Responding to change

Information is inert until you act on it. Responding well means distinguishing signal from noise, connecting the dots across signals, and recognizing both threats and opportunities. It also means turning insights into action. When you sense change, how well does it reach your assessments, decisions, and actions?

Responding well to change brings resilience. Great strategists stress-test their strategies to uncover key risks and validate assumptions early. They use scenario planning to anticipate plausible futures. They avoid over-optimizing, knowing that single points of failure or dependency create fragility. And they accelerate feedback loops. If you can cultivate a culture of transparency, curiosity, and adaptability, you can improve the speed with which you sense and respond to change, and thus increase resilience.

Initiating change

The best strategists don’t rely solely on reacting to change, or playing defense. They also initiate change. They play offense and create their own waves.

That means setting the pace, leading innovation, and expanding the customer value proposition. Sometimes that means disrupting yourself before others do.

In short, they generate opportunities and impose their will on the market and competition.

Any strategy that is sufficiently ambitious will have key underlying assumptions with some degree of uncertainty and risk. Great strategists front-load risk, seeking to validate assumptions and remove risk as quickly and inexpensively as possible. They actively experiment, constantly probing, learning, and discovering.

The experiments that prove untimely, unpromising, or unviable get revised, dampened, or killed outright. Those experiments that thrive get amplified and expanded. This results in a portfolio of initiatives that combines little bets, to explore, test, and learn, with big bets, to scale and expand genuinely promising opportunities.

Strategy as Position, Movement, AND Dynamics

Strategy is about position. A good strategy concentrates effort and energy to produce outsized results. When energy and effort align on a high-leverage pivot point, their impact compounds and multiplies. As Richard Rumelt put it:

“The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Strategy is also about movement and dynamics, embracing and taking advantage of change. It’s about catching and riding waves, and sometimes making your own. And it’s about preventing waves from crashing on your head.

This has implications for leadership and culture. It calls for breaking down information silos and barriers to transparency; cultivating tolerance for ambiguity; and rewarding a bias-to-action and experimentation, with clear-eyed reflection and learning.

This also shapes how you define your mission, vision, and strategic intent. You want to make them specific enough to unify and inspire coherent action, and you want them broad enough to invite local initiative and leave room-to-maneuver for agility on the front lines.

With an adaptive strategy, you make your business far more resilient and far more capable of driving change, creating opportunity, and thriving in a world that won’t sit still or slow down.

The imperative is not merely to have a strategy. It’s to practice strategy.