Strategy – The
Sine Qua Non of Success*
In all the history of competition - military
and business - the ability to create and execute good strategy
has been the hallmark of winners. As important as strategic thinking
and action have always been, in today’s hyper-velocity world
they are more important than ever. The Prometheus Process
is a comprehensive methodology for creating and executing good
strategy throughout an organization; it applies to any kind
of competitive environment - from business to war. If you
want success in today’s world, you need strategic
thinking and execution throughout your organization -
not just at the senior executive level. Wolf Management
Consultants can help you develop a great strategy
that should significantly increase your return on the people,
ideas, and capital that are already part of your organization.
Welcome
to the world of Prometheus!*
It may surprise you to learn that you witnessed the birth
of a powerful business process Prometheus - on global television.
It was the evening of January 16, 1991 when the launch of the
first hyper-war was broadcast live on CNN. Developed at warp-speed
and designed for overwhelming victory, the Desert Storm air campaign
lit up the skies of Baghdad and changed strategic thinking
forever. Now, this breakthrough concept has been applied to
another kind of intense competition: the fast changing world
of 21st century business.
The
Prometheus Process*
The Prometheus Process is a mindset and a methodology
for rapid, decisive strategic action. Its essence is simple: think
strategically, focus sharply, and move quickly.
- Prometheus delivers a powerful message. You
can control your destiny - if you are willing to shed yesterday’s
thinking about business strategy and make the future what you
want it to be!
- Transform your organization into a nimble, market-leading
winner!
- Design and execute a Grand Strategy that everyone
from the boardroom to the front line will share, understand,
and execute!
- Shape Tomorrow before it shapes you!
The Prometheus Process is all about strategy. There
is no other time in the last two decades of American business
history where strategy was as essential as it is now. To use Andy
Grove’s phrase, we are clearly at a strategic inflection
point in technology, time, and geopolitics; there are now opportunities
that previously did not exist and, conversely, processes that
worked for years are no longer attractive. It is through mastery
of strategic thinking and execution that individuals and companies
alike are able to determine their destinies and rise above the
uncertainties around them.
The Prometheus Process allows you to create and execute
a uniquely encompassing strategy - one that carries you from concept
to end game. It helps you choose the right things—your
internal and external centers of gravity—against which to
put your energy. It shows you graphically why the normal serial
approach to business has such a low probability of success; it
provides you with concepts and tools to move to parallel operations,
with their high probabilities of success and accompanying low
risk. Finally, it shows you how to recognize and deal with the
points of diminishing return in your products and business concepts.
Why is the Prometheus Process needed?
If you want to be more profitable, to see more results from your
hard work, and to get greater satisfaction from your enterprise,
you need to create and execute good strategy, for it is strategy
more than anything else which gives you sustainable success.
The Prometheus Process is a proven approach
to developing and executing strategy throughout an organization.
It helps organizations and individuals stay ahead of change and
profit from it. It is a necessity for any organization or any
person wanting to maximize opportunities, minimize risk, and see
good returns on investments of people, time and money. In some
situations, it may even be your key to survival.
You won’t win by following the rules of yesterday. Use
Prometheus to create your own rules with a winning strategy—an
integrated plan that will take you from concept to execution to
completion.
The Promethic Laws
The Prometheus Process is built on a group of natural laws
of strategy as follows:
- Every action affects the future
- Specific actions create a specific future
- Every thing and every action happens in a system
- All systems have inertia and resist change
- All systems have Centers of Gravity
- Systems Change when their Centers of Gravity
change
- The extent and probability of system change is
proportional to the number of Centers of Gravity affected,
and the speed at which they are affected
- All known systems and things have a beginning
and an end
- Specific actions produce specific ends
The Four Imperatives of
Prometheus
Strategy is all about guiding the outcome of individual effort
and events to produce success. In strategic terms, success is
producing a sustainable outcome that is valuable and satisfying
over time. Strategy, then, is not winning battles; rather it is
winning wars and more particularly the peace that follows them.
Focusing only on battles at the expense of wars and the subsequent
peace is dangerous in the extreme and almost never leads to long-term
success.
Many people think that strategic thought and execution are very
difficult. To the contrary, almost everyone can learn to do both.
The operative word, however, is “learn.” We all grow
up in a tactical world, where looking both ways before we cross
the street is a necessity for survival. Likewise, in our education,
we spend the overwhelming majority of our time learning details,
while we spend little time trying to integrate what we have learned.
So, unfortunately, strategy is foreign to most of us - we have
had little exposure to it, and we are normally rewarded for tactical,
not strategic, prowess. If, however, we really want our efforts
to produce sustained success, then we must learn strategy at both
an organization and a personal level. Fortunately, despite
the mysteries surrounding strategy, learning to think and act
strategically is not too difficult, but it does require you to
view the world in a different way.
The Elements of Strategy
At its most basic level, strategy has four
simple components:
I. Knowing where you want to end up
II. Knowing what to put your energy against
III. Knowing the methodology of applying your energy
IV. Knowing parameters for the inevitable end games
Any strategic system that does not deal with all four of
these elements is deficient and not likely to lead to sustained
success.
In the Prometheus Process, each of these necessary elements
is addressed by an “Imperative”, or key step
in the process.
Imperative I: Design the Future
The first (and importantly first) step in strategic thinking
is to identify the future that you want to create. In the Prometheus
Process, the desired future is called the Future Picture.
It is a very hard, very objective, very measurable picture
of the future you want to create. In the Prometheus
Process, you break the Future Picture into 12 separate,
very descriptive elements that ensure a balanced future embraced
by all.
Accompanying the Future Picture are Strategic Measures of
Merit—those measures that tell you when you have achieved
your Future Picture, or when you are on the right course for
it. They are normally not the same measures you use at a tactical
level. In fact, tactical measures can be quite dangerous when
applied at a strategic level.
The third key part of designing the future is deciding on the
Guiding Precepts which will apply to the organization.
Guiding Precepts describe the essence of the organization
(e.g., Nordstrom’s extreme customer focus), and the boundaries
you intend to accept regardless of the circumstances (e.g., the
opposite of the Enron Executive Committee waiving its conflict
of interest rules for off-book deals).
The Prometheus Process assumes that the people
in an organization generally know more about their business than
anyone else in the world. It also assumes that people in an organization
will make and execute smart plans if they have a disciplined process
which takes place in an Open Planning environment. The
more people who are involved in the planning process, the faster
it goes, and the more likely that the plan will be well executed.
In general, it is good to have at least three echelons (Management
Layers) involved in the Open Planning process. Having three
echelons ensures that there will be good knowledge and experience
in the room. It also means that as the planning merges into execution,
there will be very few errors made as a result of confusion over
direction, or disagreement with the plan.
Imperative II: Target for Success
There are a very large number of things against which an organization
can put its limited resources. You know intuitively that some
of those things will have much higher impact than others. The
organization which targets the right things, the Centers of Gravity,
will be far more effective, at a much lower cost, than the organization
that has no disciplined way to choose and affect its targets.
The Prometheus Process recognizes that everything
takes place in the context of a system and that systems have such
annoying characteristics as inertia and resistance to change.
But they also have Centers of Gravity—the handful of
things in a system that produce disproportionate impact when affected.
The Five Rings model—exclusive to the Prometheus
Process—provides a real-world way to understand
organizations and markets as a system, and to find their Centers
of Gravity. The best way to change a system (your organization,
your market) is by affecting its Centers of Gravity.
If you want to put your organization or market on a new track,
it is necessary to create rapid and hard-to-reverse system change.
To create hard-to-reverse system change, you must affect system
Centers of Gravity in a compressed period of time. Doing so greatly
reduces the ability of the system to resist what you want it to
do, and the changes tend to stick. This leads to the third of
the Prometheus Imperatives—Campaign to Win.
Imperative III: Campaign to Win
With the Future Picture standing before everyone as a
clear beacon to guide actions, you begin to attack the Centers
of Gravity previously identified. You do this with Campaign Teams
drawn from across the organization, and consisting to the maximum
extent possible of those who participated in the creation of the
Future Picture, and the identification of the Centers of Gravity.
It is the objective of the Campaign Teams, continuing to work
in an Open Planning environment, to affect the Centers of Gravity
in Parallel, which means to affect them all in a very
compressed time frame. Compressed, Parallel Operations have far
higher probabilities of success than do stretched-out serial operations,
and paradoxically cost much less.
Imperative IV: Finish with Finesse
In the real world, every business cycle and product has a beginning
and an end. Even though we know this to be the case, very few
organizations plan for the back side of the inevitable cycle.
The failure to plan in advance means that too much energy is devoted
to the wrong things. In the Prometheus Process,
you plan so as to exit cycles and products with maximum gains.
Cardinal Rules
The Prometheus Process incorporates a number of “Cardinal
Rules” that generally apply across the board in any
kind of competitive environment. They flow from historical and
modern experiences in business and geopolitics. Applied to every
phase of planning and execution, they simplify and expedite decisions
at all levels. They also apply in everyday personal life. When
you follow them, you improve your probability of succeeding. The
following are illustrative of the dozen plus Prometheus Cardinal
Rules:
- Think Like An Architect, Not A Bricklayer
An architect would never begin a design project by limiting
himself to the pile of old bricks and wood in his scrap yard.
He begins with the concept, the design, and works backwards.
You must do the same thing.
- Plan In The Open, And Use A Red Team
Open Planning means including as many people as physically
(or virtually) possible from all levels in your organization
in every phase of planning. Strive to include at least three
echelons in planning and decision meetings. Open Planning
leads to expeditious and timely planning and execution that
is strategically aligned across the organization.
A Red Team methodology is a necessary adjunct to good
planning and execution at any level. When people work together,
they inevitably make compromises and they also have a tendency
to fall into a “group think” mode. Compromises in
themselves are not necessarily bad, except they are generally
made during the course of a planning session, and are rarely
understood in the context of the entire plan. “Group think”
might turn out to be fine, but the chances are that as the group
homes in on one approach, it tends to discard all the rest of
the options without careful thought.
I t is the job of the Red Team to attack the plan in order
to expose weaknesses in it. They can be a dedicated group,
or the whole planning team periodically putting on its ‘red
hats’ and reversing roles. Not only does the Red Team
approach almost always find flaws that need repair, it also
gives people confidence to allow planning to proceed along lines
with which they may have some discomfort, because they know
there will be a second look from a different direction.
- Execute Good Enough Plans
Good enough plans rapidly and aggressively executed are far
superior to perfect plans too long delayed. You may find
that data that were correct and relevant today may be incorrect
and irrelevant tomorrow. In today’s world, the advantages
of high velocity are enormous.
- Maximize Friends, Minimize Enemies
Enemies and friends are always a choice. Friends are good
and you cannot have too many of them. Enemies are bad, and no
one can afford very many, if any. There is a tendency to think
that we are issued our fair portion, and that not much can be
done about it. The fact is that friends and enemies are all
optional, but the impact of not having enough friends, or of
having too many enemies is certain.
The Prometheus Process
Differentiators
Unlike most strategic planning methodologies, the Prometheus
Process provides a means for start to finish strategic
planning and execution to be used at every level
of an organization. It emphasizes: Objective Descriptions of the
organization’s Desired Future with accompanying Strategic
Measures of Merit; understanding organizational values through
the creation of Guiding Precepts; a real world Systems Approach
to find Centers of Gravity within an organization and in its markets;
Flexible Organization; Open Planning at every level; Rapid System
Change, and preparation of End Game Plans for every facet of the
business. Specifically:
- Prometheus is designed for fast and dramatic
success in the digital age, not the industrial age.
- Prometheus provides a complete strategic
framework - from concept to execution to termination.
- Prometheus uses the best people in the world
to build strategic plans and operations—the organization’s
own people.
- Prometheus focuses everyone on the future.
- Prometheus accelerates execution because
many people (sometimes all) are involved in planning and
are committed to success.
- Prometheus enables people to make smart
decisions because they know the strategy and because they
have developed Strategic Measures of Merit at every level.
- Prometheus enables people to understand
the differences between tactical measures and Strategic
Measures of Merit.
- Prometheus focuses energy on the Centers
of Gravity that will make a real difference.
- Prometheus takes an organization out of the
high risk serial world, and puts it in the low risk
parallel world, where probabilities of success are very
high.
- Prometheus promotes an efficient, aligned
organization that works in a fast-time learning environment.
- Prometheus allows an organization to be
highly flexible, within agreed strategic boundaries.
- Prometheus helps an organization to become
a learning organization, capable of transmitting key information
to everyone in near real-time.
- Prometheus provides the methodology and
discipline to get out of projects that are not working.
- Prometheus creates hard-to-reverse market
and organization change.
* “Strategy- The Sine Qua Non of Success”:
Strategy Presentation by John Warden to The Company Grade Officer's
Group, Gunter AB, AL May 2003
* “Winning
in FastTime” – John A. Warden III and Leland A.
Russell, 2002 - Venturist Publishing; ISBN 0-9711591-4-9
* The Prometheus Process was created
and developed by John Warden of the Venturist Corporation and
is licensed to WMC through Wolf Management Consultant; James R.
McCarthy.
