At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.

Robin Holt is Professor of Strategy and Aesthetics and the University of Bristol Business School. He is the author of Judgment and Strategy (2018) and co-author of Strategy without Design, with Robert Chia (Cambridge, 2009). He was previously editor-in-chief of the journal Organization Studies.

Introduction: strategy as the basic question of organization?; Part I. Authenticity: 1. Strategy and the organization of authenticity in the polis; 2. Can the strategoi ever build a polis?; 3. Strategy in the lifeworld, and the problem with home; Part II. The Three Epochs of Strategy: Techn¿, Technology, Technogenesis: 4. Techn¿ ¿ creating organizational forms from the earth; 5. Technology, machinery and giving over to the general in strategic practice; 6. Strategy as world picture; 7. Who or what is running strategy?; 8. The apparatus of Napoleon's forms of communication; 9. Strategy no longer thinks in terms of human beings; Part III. The Open: 10. Impoverished by strategy; 11. Reaching for open ¿ strategy unbound.