“Strategy” – what’s in a name?

I started wondering yesterday about the connection between “strategy” and the change process on which I spent so much time last year. And why I had failed to include the term in that 60-page paper about Change.

A STRATEGY is something an individual or organisation develops when they want to move from a present they see as problematic to a better future. It involves designing and implementing CHANGE – and can be done at different levels

• of the individual person – when, for example, (s)he wants to change diet or career

• organisational – both commercial and governmental. Companies will develop strategies for their change efforts whereas governments will tend to talk about “policies” (eg social, economic, urban, regional, military etc)

• societal – when the private, public and voluntary sectors team up to deal with an intractable problem – whether at the local, national or international level. Language tends to vary at this level – “anti-corruption strategies” is a frequently used term but, for some reason, there seem few “global warming” strategies.

In the beginning, it was the generals who used the language of strategy – 19^th century Clausewitz being the most famous and it was American business that started to use the term in the 1960s. Indeed it’s only been in the last couple of decades we’ve see definitive texts about strategy – in particular

• Strategy – a history; Lawrence Freedman (2013) a military strategist breaks out of his discipline and, in a highly readable fashion, summarises the literature of both business and government strategy-making – including an amazing chapter on “change from below” which brings in Marx

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – the difference and why it matters  

Richard Rumelt (2011) 

• The Art Of Public Strategy: Mobilizing Power And Knowledge For The Common Good; Geoff Mulgan (2009) which is a superb overview of government strategy development written by someone who was Tony Blair's Head of the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit when it was setting the world alight and has, since then, advised many other government

• Strategy safari: A guided tour through the wilds of strategic management; Henry Mintzberg et al (2005). The definitive treatment of the different approaches to the development of strategy in the private sector from the Canadian who can be said to have inherited Peter Drucker's mantle.