Business is what intelligence under scarcity produces. Strategizing is what's required to navigate it.
Most discussions of business strategy start from an implicit assumption: business is a thing humans invented, and strategic thinking is a professional skill you develop to succeed inside it. I want to argue that both halves of that are wrong, and see what the community thinks.
The argument is structural. Any persistent organized system in a resource-constrained environment must acquire and deploy resources or cease to exist. That creates a drive toward successful existence. The drive produces a hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy produces decisions. Decisions among multiple agents produce specialization and exchange. Recurring exchange produces stable patterns that, aggregated across many agents, look like an economy.
What I'm pointing at is that this sequence doesn't require humans, doesn't require markets, doesn't require contracts or firms. It only requires intelligent agents operating under scarcity who address each other's needs. The institutional forms — markets, contract law, the corporation — are cultural inventions. But the underlying phenomenon (specialization, exchange, the formation of stable patterns of value-trading) is what happens whenever the conditions are met. Different societies have wrapped the same underlying phenomenon in different institutional clothes — reciprocity within kinship networks, redistribution through political authority, formal market exchange — but the underlying dynamic is the same.
If that's right, two things follow.
First, business is more like agriculture than like chess. Chess is a human invention; agriculture is intelligence under scarcity producing techniques for deriving sustenance from controlled biological systems. Business sits in the agriculture category, not the chess category — it's what intelligence does when faced with the conditions, not a game we made up.
Second, the dynamics inside business aren't strategic choices, they're structural inevitabilities. Commoditization isn't a market failure; it's what happens whenever an intelligent agent figures out a solution to a need that other agents also have. Innovation isn't a strategic option; it's a structural necessity for any agent whose returns are dropping as others learn. These aren't competitive moves agents elect to make. They're what the system produces.
Which leads to the third implication: strategizing is not a business skill. It's the structural capability any intelligent agent must develop to navigate dynamics that are structurally inevitable. True for a CEO, but also true for anyone making decisions inside structures shaped by forces they didn't choose.
The argument engages with several intellectual traditions — Hayek's spontaneous order, Nelson and Winter's evolutionary economics, Ridley on exchange as a biological drive, the complexity economics work coming out of Santa Fe. I wrote a longer version on my blog last week if anyone wants to see how the engagements unfold:
The argument runs against the conventional framing in economics, which treats markets and contracts as the substance of business rather than the cultural wrappers of an underlying phenomenon. The conventional framing has it inverted. The wrappers vary. The phenomenon doesn't.