Where does strategy collide?

A firm's integrated set of choices about where to compete and how to win, meant to build a lasting advantage over rivals and steer the organisation toward long-term goals. Mintzberg's 1987 The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps for Strategy argued the word carries several meanings at once, an intended plan, a ploy to outwit a competitor, a realised pattern of behaviour, a market position, and a shared perspective, and that a firm's actual strategy is as much the pattern that emerges from its actions as the plan it wrote down. The referent is a purposeful direction chosen by managers and judged by market results, not a formal rule for a game, a behaviour fixed by natural selection, or the conduct of a war.[1]

Unit

One firm's chosen direction, in its market positions and resource commitments

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read from stated plans and, more tellingly, from the pattern of realised choices, and judged by competitive position, profitability, and growth

A complete rule that tells a player what to do in every situation the game could present, fixed in advance so that nothing is left to decide once play begins. A pure strategy names one action per situation, a mixed strategy assigns probabilities across actions, and Nash's 1951 Non-Cooperative Games proved that in any finite game there is at least one profile of such strategies, one per player, at which no player can do better by changing their own, the arrangement now called a Nash equilibrium. The referent is a formal, exhaustively specified plan analysed by mathematics, and because it already encodes every move there is no separate notion of tactics within it, unlike a manager's evolving direction, a heritable animal behaviour, or a general's campaign.[2]

Unit

One player's full contingent plan, one specified response per situation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Written out as an action or a probability for each information state, and analysed for best responses, dominance, and equilibrium

A pattern of behaviour that, once common in a population, cannot be displaced by any rare alternative behaviour, because a member following it does at least as well against the crowd as any mutant would. Maynard Smith and Price's 1973 The Logic of Animal Conflict introduced this evolutionarily stable strategy to explain why animals contesting resources often limit their aggression, treating each behaviour as a heritable type competing on reproductive payoff rather than a plan anyone chooses. The referent is a stable behavioural phenotype selected by evolution and defined only by its fitness against rivals, not a firm's deliberate direction, a formal rule a player picks, or a commander's plan for war.[3]

Unit

One heritable behaviour type, scored by its reproductive payoff against the population

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Modelled as a payoff-earning behaviour in a population game and checked for whether any rare alternative could invade it

The planning and direction of a war as a whole, the use of engagements and campaigns to reach the political object for which the war is fought, as against tactics, which is the conduct of the individual battle. Clausewitz's On War, published in 1832 after his death, framed war as a continuation of policy by other means and set strategy above tactics as the level that links force to political aims. The referent is the art of directing armed force toward a state's purposes, judged by whether the war achieves its ends, and it is distinct from a company's market plan, a formal rule in a game, and a behaviour fixed by natural selection.[4]

Unit

The overall direction of one war or campaign, in objectives and the forces committed to them

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed against the political object of the war and the fit between military means and that end