As the studies developed on this topic show, the origins of strategy are to be found in ancient military writings or, more specifically, in the treatises of war, or as they were called in the past treatises of ‘Military Art’ or ‘Art of War’, which were written more than two thousand years ago in ancient Greece and China. The concept of strategy first emerged in China in the 5th century B.C., with representative works such as the Ping Fa or The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and then in the 4th century B.C. in ancient Greece, with representative examples such as Xenophon’s ‘Cyropedia’. The armies as guarantors of security were entrusted to military leaders who would manoeuvre them wisely in times of confrontation, thus wielding their skills as strategists. In this context, strategy took the form of military maxims, which were developed in and for war but whose quest was peace. Quinn (1980) recalls that one of the main tasks of the historians of that time was to compile the knowledge drawn from the strategies developed in war, both successful and unsuccessful, to serve as a reference and guide for the future.
Much more recently, in the 20th century, we find another of the commonly cited origins of strategy. It is Game Theory developed by the mathematician Von Neumann in 1928. In 1944, together with Morgenstern, Von Neumann published the book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, which presented the application of this theory to economics for the first time. Rather than a unified theory, it is a set of models and techniques oriented to the study and solution of problems in situations of conflict or competition with characteristics similar to those of a game, in which various agents or companies mutually influence each other in making decisions to achieve their objectives. From the point of view of game theory, the player’s strategy represents “the complete set of instructions that indicate the exact way to act in all conceivable circumstances of the game, or more specifically in any conceivable situation that may exist at each moment of a game” (McKinsey, 1960).
Finally, and related to the field that applies to us, it was in the early sixties when the interest in business strategy was born and took off, at a time when companies had to face a turning point in their fundamentals and behaviours. This was a time of great opening of geographical borders, leading to the development of ambitious business growth plans in order to take advantage of the expansive flows. At the same time a much more complex and dynamic era of change was ushered in by the competitive environment itself. Depending on the companies’ capacity to anticipate or react, this new context represented an opportunity or a threat and, faced with this dilemma, organizations were forced to reflect and plan what they should do and how they should do it.
If you are interested in going deeper into the strategic process, allow me to recommend you: - Book: "The strategic process of the firm: Theory and cases" (Roch, 2024). - Courses and consulting program on the strategic process.
