A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. The word strategy has military connotations, because it derives from the Greek word for army.

Strategy is different from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.

Strategy is relevant to many areas of life, from getting the right date for the school disco to running a business. For example, the goal of a company may be to increase profits which is a strategy: the tactics chosen might be to undertake an advertising campaign; invest in a new computer system; or adjust pricing.

Strategies in game theory

In game theory, a strategy refers to one of the options that a player can choose. That is, every player in a non-cooperative game has a set of possible strategies, and must choose one of them.

Strategies in game theory may be random or deterministic. That is, in some games, players choose mixed strategies, be thought of as a special case of mixed strategies, in which only probabilities 0 or 1 are assigned to actions.

Noted texts on strategy

Classic texts such as Chanakya's Arthashastra written in the 3rd century BC, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, written in China 2,500 years ago, the political strategy of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, written in 1513, or Carl von Clausewitz's On War, published in 1832, as with the Japanese classic Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Mushashi written in 1645, are still well known, and highly influential. In the twentieth century, the subject of strategic management has been particularly applied to organisations, most typically to business firms and corporations.

The nature of historic texts differs greatly from area to area, and given the nature of strategy itself, there are some potential parallels between various forms of strategy (noting, for example, the popularity of the The Art of War as a business book). Each domain generally has its own foundational texts, as well as more recent contributions to new applications of strategy. Some of these are:

• Political strategy
• The Prince, published in 1532 by Niccolò Machiavelli
• Arthashastra, written in the 4th century BC by Chanakya
• The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione
• Military strategy:
• The Art of War, written in the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu
• Strategikon, written in the 6th century AD by the Byzantine emperor Maurice
• Taktikon, by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise
• On War, by Carl von Clausewitz (19th century)
• Strategy, by Basil Liddell Hart
• On Guerrilla Warfare, by Mao Zedong
• The Influence of Sea Power upon History, by Alfred Thayer Mahan
• The Air Campaign, by Colonel John A. Warden, III
• Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret
• Strategy, by Edward N. Luttwak
• Economic strategy
• General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 by John Maynard Keynes
• Business strategy
• Competitive Strategy, by Michael Porter
• Strategy Concept I: Five Ps for Strategy and Strategy Concept II: Another Look at Why Organizations Need Strategies, by Henry Mintzberg
• Winning In FastTime by John A. Warden, III and Leland A. Russell, 2002.
• ''World Class Organization Strategy by Manoj Sharma 2009.
• General strategy
• Strategy Safari, by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel.
• Political Strategy and Tactics by Laure Paquette
• Strategic Theory
• Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Frans Osinga
• Strategy generative by Jean-Paul Charnay
• Strategy and Ethnic Conflict by Laure Paquette
• Others
• Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les Ruses de l'intelligence, Paris: Flammarion, 1993 (on the role of the Greek Metis)