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What is Strategy?

It seems that people have practiced strategy since the beginning of time.  The great Chinese military theorist, Sun Tzu, described his principles of war as early as 500 BCE.  But the use of the word "strategy" in English [derived from the Greek "strathgia" - office or command of a general] dates only to the end of the seventeenth century.  And the Oxford English Dictionary records the first familiar usage of the word in 1810 in a military dictionary:

1810 C. James Milit. Dict. (ed. 3) s.v., "Strategy differs materially from tactic; the latter belonging only to the mechanical movement of bodies, set in motion by the former."

It is only around this period that military thinkers, notably the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, began to use the word to distinguish a type of complex, dynamic planning  from traditional battlefield tactics.  Even more surprising, perhaps, the word was only applied to business thinking starting in 1965 with the publication of Ansoff's work on Corporate Strategy.  Bruce Henderson  and the Boston Consulting Group were early pioneers in the articulation of principles of strategy in business.  Despite its ancient roots, one might argue that strategy is still a young science.