Strategy

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A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.

Strategy is different from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.

Strategy is relevant to many areas of life, from getting the right date for the school disco to running a business. For example, the goal of a company may be to increase profits: the strategy chosen might be to undertake an advertising campaign; invest in a new computer system; or adjust pricing.

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[edit] Strategies in game theory

In game theory, a strategy refers to one of the options that a player can choose. That is, every player in a non-cooperative game has a set of possible strategies, and must choose one of them.

Strategies in game theory may be random or deterministic. That is, in some games, players choose mixed strategies, which means choosing probabilities for a set of possible actions. In other games, players choose pure strategies, which means choosing one action with certainty. A pure strategy can be thought of as a special case of mixed strategies, in which only probabilities 0 or 1 are assigned to actions.

[edit] Noted texts on strategy

Classic texts such as Chanakya's Arthashastra written in the 3rd century BC, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, written in China 2,500 years ago, the political strategy of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, written in 1513, or Carl von Clausewitz's On War, published in 1832, as with the Japanese classic Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Mushashi written in 1645, are still well known, and highly influential. In the twentieth century, the subject of strategic management has been particularly applied to organisations, most typically to business firms and corporations.

The nature of historic texts differs greatly from area to area, and given the nature of strategy itself, there are some potential parallels between various forms of strategy (noting, for example, the popularity of the The Art of War as a business book). Each domain generally has its own foundational texts, as well as more recent contributions to new applications of strategy. Some of these are:

[edit] See also

Look up strategy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[edit] References

Author: de Geus, Arie (not Arieu as previously quoted) Source: Reflections: The SoL Journal, Volume 8, Number 1, February 2007 , pp. 28-35(8) Publisher: Society for Organizational Learning

[edit] External links

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