The Concept Of Strategy

The Concept of Strategy
by Bruce Henderson
A Special Commentary (abridged)
The Beginning of Natural Competition
Competition existed long before strategy. Competition began with life itself. The first one cell organisms required certain resources for maintenance of life. When those resources were adequate, then each generation became greater in number than the preceding one. If there had beenno limitation on required resources, then exponential growth would have led to infinite numbers.
But as life evolved, the single cell life became a food resource for more complex life. With greater complexity, each level became the resource for the next higher level. When two competitors were in perpetual competition, one inevitably displaced the other, unless something prevented it. In theabsence of some counterbalancing force, which maintained a stable equilibrium between the two competitors by giving each an advantage in his own territory, only one survived.
In this way a very complex web of competitive interaction developed. It required millions of years. Now there are more than a million distinct species which have been catalogued. Each has a unique advantage in competition for itsrequired resources within its particular niche of the environment. There are believed to be millions more such variations of species as yet unclassified.
Since each of these competitors must be unique, the abundance of variations must match an equal variation in potential factors which define a niche and the varied characteristics in the environment which make that combination effective. Thericher the environment, the more severe the competition is and the greater number of competitors. Likewise, the richer the environment, the smaller the differences between competitors.
This is quite consistent with biological research of the recent past. Experimental laboratory ecologists discovered in the 1930s and 1940s that if one puts two similar species of small organisms together in a bottlewith food and uniform substrate, only once species can persist1.
The observation that coexisting species in nature do differ ecologically and that species must differ ecologically to coexist in bottles led to the “competitive exclusion principle” developed by Georgii Frantsevitch Gause’s, the Russian biologist: “No two species can coexist who make their living in the same way.”
For millions ofyears natural competition involved no strategy. It was natural selection, adaptation, and survival of the fittest. Random chance determined the mutations and variations which survived and succeeded to compound their numbers. Those who left relatively fewer offspring became displaced. Those who adapted best displaced the rest. Physical and structural characteristics adapted, but behavior adapted alsoand became embedded in their instinctual reactions.
The awareness of natural competition as a systematic effect is centuries old. Thomas Malthus quoted Benjamin Franklin’s observation about the crowding out of natural competition. Charles Darwin himself credited Malthus with the insight. Alfred Russel Wallace and Darwin, separated by thousands of miles, both developed simultaneously the conceptof natural selection by competition. Darwin emphasized repeatedly the overriding importance of competition. It is awesome in its potential for evolution.
As far as we know, only primates possess imagination and the ability to reason logically. But without these capabilities, behavior and tactics are either intuitive or the result of conditioned reflexes. Strategy is impossible. Strategy dependsupon the ability to foresee the future consequences of present initiatives.
1 Gause, 1934; Crombie, 1946; Park, 1948.
The Beginning of Strategic Competition
Strategy in its most elementary form most likely developed when the hunting party was formed by early humans to capture large game which could not have been handled by a single individual. But this was hardly true strategy. The quarry...