The term "strategy" comes from the Greek "strategos," which means, literally, "general of the army”, and strategic planning continued its military roots with the teachings of Chinese general Sun Tzu, who wrote of warfare and the strategic underpinnings of success in 500BC.
It wasn’t until the early 1920s that strategy found its way to academia and Harvard Business School developed the Harvard Policy Model - one of the first strategic planning frameworks for private businesses. The Harvard model taught that strategy is a pattern of purposes and policies that defining the company and its business. In short, it’s the common thread or underlying logic that holds a business together.
Through the late 1950's, strategic planning's shifted toward the “portfolio model”, which focused on the management of risk, industry growth, and market share.
One of the early modern frameworks for business planning was developed by Igor Ansoff, whose “Ansoff Matrix” was based on the idea that there were only four ways an organization could expand its markets or overall performance. Then through the 1960s, strategic planning became a standard management tool in virtually every Fortune 500 company, and many smaller companies as well.
In the 1990s, “The Balanced Scorecard” approach came to the fore and tied the strategic objectives of an organization to its performance measures. The approach was based on the idea that in order to improve strategic planning, organisations needed to maintain a tight link between their objectives and their day-to-day operations.
