The study of strategic management is rich in metaphor and literary device, even if not apparently so on the surface.

Consider the aphorism of Archilochus c. 680c. 645 BC, a poet but also a warrior, so apt to describe strategic planning: The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing. Not only could such a statement describe different theorists within the discipline, but the theories per se, especially from the vantage point of having a duplicity of definitions, schools, methodologies, as well as their accompanying underlying assumptions. Tracing the origins of strategic management as a discipline is by no means an easy task, this also being a point of contention among theorists. "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu is widely cited as a handbook for strategy, or the beginnings thereof of the notion of strategizing within the corpus of management theory and research, and has relevance for management in the present age with timely advice in its chapters: knowing the enemy (competitor), laying plans (positioning), etc. Yet from a cognitive perspective, one cannot help but entertain the idea of strategy being as old as the grouping of humans in their nascent state; having to plan, project and forecast how the hunt or battle will be played out. Whenever a human process was enacted, we can be safe to state that strategy born. These terms implicate each other. Strategy, from an etymological tracing, can be defined as art of the general, yet also closely related to structure, and a spreading out or organization of the army. In addition, a quick reference to the term process and one finds its militaristic and organizational roots in the collective actions of "to go forward" "journey" "course or method of action" and current notions derived from the French as a "continuous series of actions meant to accomplish some result." One does not have to pursue the notion very far without encountering a number of military secondary metaphors accompanying organizational planning and strategic management: take charge, lead the way, conquer the competition, onward troops, etc. Consider the following quote from the late Steve Jobs CEO of Apple: I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apples $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong, Jobs said. Im going to destroy Android, because its a stolen product. Im willing to go thermonuclear war on this. Whether scientific management is an art or science can be found in a few incommensurable epistemological and ontological assumptions located in the not only the methodologies invoked or employed, but within the school or discipline in which the definition and object of research is related to. What C.P. Snow called the unbridgeable Two Worlds will most likely remain so at the core. This gap has been with us at least from the amiable debates of Huxley and Arnold in the Victorian ages and the rise of the scientific method. Though at first this division may seem threatening or to use Kuhnian terms pre-paradigmatic what is lost on the bridge can be made up through heuristic potential. Similar to Archilochus Fox, the strategic management discipline knows many things. This apparent unity in multiplicity oddly enough to use a phrase of poetic description employed by Coleridge, is not a chaotic weakness of disorder but a flexible framework of diversity