How can strategy be expressed beyond language? An algorithm combines strategic associations into an individual collage. In the end, the software does not provide graphs or coordinate systems but cultural portraits of specific strategies. (Universität der Künste, Berlin)

Actually, everybody‘s a strategist. Even small children develop an eye for how and in what way they can assert their will. Is this childlike behavior already an explicit strategy?

The history of strategy is as old as mankind and can be found wherever an advantage is to be created. How can we approach such a broad and abstract subject without getting lost in a jungle of definitions and terminology?

Strategy, power and the military – it all begins with a 2500-year-old Chinese book, „The Art of War“, written by Sunzi, a Chinese general and philosopher. Next comes a classic that can be considered as the first blueprint for modern warfare, published in 1813 and written by Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, a Prussian major general. Both books have inspired generations of managers till today. As for contemporary literature, we used selected texts ranging from Harry I. Ansoff’s „Corporate Strategy“ to Michael E. Porter’s „What Is Strategy?

We got a grip on this extensive collection of texts through text mining. We cleaned up the full texts until only the most frequently used nouns remained. With these we formed independently, in the spirit of intercoder reliability, clustered semantic networks. We merged our designs and created cross-plant variables that led to the development of our own strategy formula based on the accumulated knowledge of the most important strategy experts:

approach ( act ( circumstances ( action:reaction ))) = result

This formula was tested for robustness by applying it to many existing contemporary management strategy approaches.

We not only dissected the syntax of the strategy, we also got to the bottom of its characteristics by eliciting statistically probable statements from its authors through predictive writing on the basis of the full texts. The result is not summaries, but a specific tonality: a language of strategists.

#Featuring Alexander Katzmann & Jakob Fuchs!