In this conceptual paper, we argue that humanness represents an overlooked but profound issue for strategic management: an axiomatic basis underlying different perspectives of strategy making, i.e., that organizational actors’ beliefs about strategy making also carry implicit assumptions about individuals’ humanness. While the field of strategic management has developed towards stronger focus on actors and their activities in strategy making, and critical views have shed light on the complex relationship between strategy and the individuals affected by it, the role of the human – what it means to be a human in the context of strategy making – has not been addressed. By drawing on conceptualizations of humanness in organization studies, we examine the way ‘human’ has been represented in the different schools of thought in strategic management. As a result, we describe six archetypes of humanness, each holding certain assumptions about human nature and essentially human characteristics, and their relation to strategy formation. By showing the axiomatic nature of humanness underlying different onto-epistemological standpoints towards strategy formation, these archetypes provide researchers with a concrete way to critically assess both the view of human in existing theorization and its implications of organizations, as well as the potential need for more holistic acknowledgment of human characteristics and capabilities.