Although " control " was one of the six'functions of management'listed by Henri Fayol in 1917, the idea of strategic control as a distinct activity does not appear in the management literature until the late 1970s ( e . g . " Strategic Control : a new task for top management " by J H Horovitz, which was published in 1979, is a candidate for first paper to explicitly discuss the topic ), but the first definition of strategic control in a form consistent with modern usage of the term is probably in a paper by Reufli and Sarrazin published in 1981.