Strategy
Strategy (Greek "στρατηγία" (strategia), "art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship"[1]) is a general, undetailed plan of action, encompassing a long period of time, to achieve a complicated goal.
Strategy, as a way of action, becomes necessary in a situation when, for the direct achievement of the main goal, the available resources are not enough. The task of strategy is an efficient use of the available resources for the achievement of the main goal. Tactics is the tool to implement strategy, and is subordinated to the main goal of strategy.
Detailing it further, strategy is all about gaining (or being prepared to gain) a position of advantage over adversaries or best exploiting emerging possibilities. As there is always an element of uncertainty about the future, strategy is more about a set of options ("strategic choices") than a fixed plan.
Henry Mintzberg from McGill University defined strategy as "a pattern in a stream of decisions".[2]
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[edit] Management theory
"In management theory, the Chandler definition is typical: "... the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals"."[3]
[edit] Military theory
"In military theory, strategy is "the utilization during both peace and war, of all of the nation's forces, through large scale, long-range planning and development, to ensure security and victory" (Random House Dictionary).[4]
[edit] Strategies in game theory
In game theory, a strategy refers to the rules that a player uses to choose between the available actionable options. Every player in a non-trivial game has a set of possible strategies to use when choosing what moves to make.
A strategy may recursively look ahead and consider what actions can happen in each contingent state of the game—e.g. if the player takes action 1, then that presents the opponent with a certain situation, which might be good or bad, whereas if the player takes action 2 then the opponents will be presented with a different sitation, and in each case the choices they make will determine our own future situation.
Strategies in game theory may be random (mixed) or deterministic (pure). Pure strategies can be thought of as a special case of mixed strategies, in which only probabilities 0 or 1 are assigned to actions.
Strategy based games generally require a player to think through a sequence of solutions to determine the best way to defeat the opponent.
[edit] See also
- Odds algorithm (Odds strategy)
- Strategy pattern
- Strategic planning
- Concept Driven Strategy
[edit] References
- ^ στρατηγία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
- ^ http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/LongStrat2010/papers/class%2010/Patterns%20of%20Strategy%20Formulation.pdf
- ^ Chandler, A.D., Strategy and Structure, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1962
- ^ http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/LongStrat2010/papers/class%2010/Patterns%20of%20Strategy%20Formulation.pdf
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Look up strategy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
