Idea 70: The art of being a leader-in-chief

There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.

Chinese proverb

Strategy (strategia in Greek) originally meant strategic leadership – the art of being a commander-in-chief.

Strategy is in fact made up of two ancient Greek words. The first part comes from stratos, which means an army spread out as in camp, and thus a large body of people. The second part, -egy, comes from the Greek verb ‘to lead’. There is a rough breathing mark in the Greek giving an h sound, which explains the spelling of the English word hegemony – meaning the leadership of one nation over others – which is derived from it.

It was Athens, rivaled only by Sparta, which claimed the hegemony of the Greek city states. Around 500BC a senior commander in the Athenian army came to be called a strategos, a leader of the army. The English word we use to translate this word is general. It literally means something (or someone) that is applicable to the whole. So a military general is the person who is accountable for the whole army as well as its parts.

Therefore the role of a strategic leader is to do for the whole what other leaders should accomplish for the parts.

Strategia, the art of being a commander-in-chief, includes not just formulating strategy (in our modern sense) but also good administration, good communications, and the training and equipping of the soldiers under one's command. It is a leadership word.

Most of the functions and qualities of strategic leadership are transferable from one field to another. The early Greeks gave us some examples: selecting, punishing and rewarding, building alliances, and being hard-working.

Some qualifications of a strategic leader are natural and some are acquired. Chief among them is the ability to win the goodwill of those under you.