I've spent 26 years in the military and national security world, and for most of it I assumed I understood strategy. Study the subject long enough, though, and the opposite happens: the more you learn, the less certain you get.

I have an MBA, so business strategy should be second nature. It isn't. I've spent years doing strategic work for the Air Force, so the fundamentals should be locked in by now. They aren't, either.

That's what I told myself right up until a senior leader walked into the office a few months ago and asked me and a colleague to define the word on the spot. What came out of my mouth was less an answer and more a series of confused noises.

For most people, strategy lives in a black box: ambiguous, hard to describe, built out of unknowns nobody can quantify. Layer in the cognitive biases we all carry, plus a world that won't hold still long enough to be studied properly, and the fog makes sense. My experience says understanding strategy takes clarity in how you communicate and plan, honesty about your own biases, a real appreciation for the qualitative, and the patience to manage change without forcing it.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. — Sun Tzu

---

Strategy started as a military word, and we've since dragged it into boardrooms, locker rooms, and just about everywhere else. The Greek root, strategos, breaks down to stratos (army) and agein (to lead): an army leader, plainly enough. According to Cambridge classicist James Diggle, the earliest recorded uses meant exactly that: a commander's plan for waging war. Somewhere between then and now, we decided the word was too useful to leave in the barracks.

Sun Tzu got there centuries before the Greeks did. Writing amid the wars of 6th century BCE China, he defined strategy as a comprehensive plan built on understanding yourself and your enemy well enough to win with minimal conflict. His Art of War earned him the title father of Eastern military strategy, and the text has shaped generals and executives for roughly two and a half thousand years. The oldest surviving copy, written on bamboo strips, wasn't unearthed until archaeologists opened a Han dynasty tomb in 1972. The ideas were already ancient by the time anyone found the receipts.

From Sun Tzu's perspective, strategy is a way of thinking about your place in the world: a complex interplay of factors that decides who wins and who loses. His writing leans hard on preparation, adaptability, and knowing both your own capabilities and your adversary's. Of every military strategist I've studied, his framework still holds up best for understanding the environment you're standing in.

Strategic Management

Doing this work for real requires a process for navigating environments that are ambiguous or outright confusing, especially over long time horizons. Every strategist worth reading has built a framework tailored to bind their thinking down to only what they can actually manage.

Michael Porter, one of the most influential business strategists alive, defined strategy as building a unique, valuable position through activities your competitors aren't running. His 1980 book Competitive Strategy has sold well over a million copies and still shows up on MBA syllabi decades later. Porter's core claim: strategy isn't about being the best at everything. It's about being different on purpose. A strategic decision, in his view, has to actively diverge from what competitors are doing, or it doesn't qualify as strategy at all.

For an evolution of Porter's thinking, I looked to Roger Martin, a longtime student and colleague of his. Martin describes strategy as "an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action." He built five questions for managers to do strategy with:

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must we have?
• What management systems are required?

Martin calls these questions an integrated cascade of choices. Answer one, and it reshapes what the others can be. That's what keeps a strategy aligned instead of turning into five disconnected wish lists.

Strategy as Art

Having drawn the line between planning and strategy, Martin offers something managers can actually use: an artistic view of the discipline. Whether you're doing strategy, management, or marketing, the goal is persuasion. In the military, I want to persuade an adversary to stand down. In business, I want to persuade a customer to buy.

Every promotion board I've sat on has confirmed the same thing: past the most junior ranks, qualitative judgment moves people further than quantitative skill ever will. Understanding the customer, the team, or the adversary gets you promoted faster than any spreadsheet, in the military or out of it. Writing forces that understanding into the open, which is probably why the best strategists I know are also the best writers I know.

Choices and Trade-offs

Every strategist I've read keeps landing on the same idea: strategy requires choices, and choices mean trade-offs. Sun Tzu says choose your battles wisely. Porter says choose your position and accept everything that position rules out. Martin says choose in a way that stays aligned with your aspirations and your actual capabilities.

So what do I actually think strategy is? Sun Tzu calls it a way of thinking about your place in the world. Porter calls it building a unique, valuable position. Martin calls it an integrated set of choices that compels customer behavior. Stack those together and I land here: strategy is the art of making choices that influence others. Wayne Dyer said it better than any of us:

"Our lives are the sum total of the choices we've made."

By that logic, strategy is choice. Every one of us is already a strategist, designing a life and, knowingly or not, influencing everyone around us. How you make those choices is your own personal art form, and it decides exactly how much influence you end up having.

So, what's your definition of strategy? What choice are you making right now that's quietly deciding where you'll be next?