What is Strategy?

The other day in an interview, someone asked me, "What is strategy". Of course we all know what strategy is, right? We have lived and breathed it all our professional and personal lives. But have you ever tried to answer that question? Here is what Webster and Wikipedia have to say:

Wikipedia: 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 general.
Webster: a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem b : the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal

Sounds straight forward enough, but I'll bet if you asked 10 business people what strategy is, you'd get 10 different answers. Here is my answer...

In business as in your personal life you have missions, visions or goals- call them what you may. You create a strategy to meet these goals. So, I agree with Wikipedea and Webster that a strategy is a plan to achieve a goal, vision or mission. Here is where folks disagree- I think that your mission, visions or goals stay constant, where you strategy needs to be tweaked or changed along the way. You've heard people say "stick to the strategy", others say "Veer from the strategy and you'll fail". I say if you don't change the strategy based on variable conditions as you work toward your vision you will fail. What do I mean?

This summer my husband and I had a mission to have our 3 kids experience Washington DC and have a wonderful time. Our strategy was to drive Minneapolis to DC using a preplanned route which would take 48 hours. including a stop at my sister's to spend the night and would arrive in DC by 1:00 on Monday. Monday afternoon we would spend at Arlington, Tuesday we would see ALL of the monuments and Wednesday we would hit 3-4 museums and be back on the road by 3 PM.
All was going well until we hit road construction. Our strategy was at risk and we had not made any contingency plans- horror! We got to DC at 3:00- 2 hours off of our strategic time frame and then we hit DC traffic which took another hour. We got to our hotel at 4:00- 3 hours off our plan, I started to stress just a bit, but we could still get to Arlington- game on! Except, the kids wanted to order pizza and watch a movie- they were sick of being in the car. What? Now our plans to go to Arlington were in jeopardy- our strategy was going downhill FAST!
Guess what we did? We went swimming, got a pizza and watched a movie.
On Tuesday we went to some, not all, of the monuments and to the Hirshhorn Museum. On Wednesday, our final day, we went to the Air and Space Museum all morning, had lunch at an outdoor cafe and then drove through Arlington National Cemetery on our way out at 3:00 PM.
Think about it, we got to DC 3 hours after our planned time, we missed "touring" Arlington, we missed 2 monuments and we only went to 2 museums instead of 4. This project manager, me, had failed to accomplish our strategy- or did I? Remember that our mission was to have our kids experience DC and have a wonderful time. If you ask the kids about the trip they will tell you that it was one of the best trips ever. We tweaked our strategy based on the conditions that changed on us, but we succeeded at our mission.

I would offer that a good strategy is a clear plan that is flexible enough to change with variable conditions and meet the stated mission, vision or goal.
What do you think??