Strategic Leadership

The Ancient Roots of Leadership

Strategic leadership focuses on the future, though it is an ancient concept. Strategy (“strategia in Greek”) originally referred solely to military leadership. Five hundred years before Christ, a strategos was an Athenian army senior commander, the equivalent of a modern-day general. Athenian citizens elected their strategoi, and merit figured heavily in their election.

The Greek philosopher Socrates contemplated the subject of strategic leadership: He believed that as craftsmen learn their skills, so too can people learn to become capable, even exemplary, leaders. Xenophon, who became a strategos of great renown, was a member of Socrates’s inner circle. He wrote about Socrates’s dialogues with his students, including his discussions of leadership.

According to Xenophon, Socrates believed that soldiers would follow leaders who demonstrated competency and knowledge. Xenophon wrote of Socrates’s high standards for any strategos: “He must be resourceful, active, careful, hard and quick-witted; he must be both gentle and brutal, at once straightforward and designing, capable of both caution and ...