The Prometheus Process

James R. McCarthy, M.S., C.P.C.
Senior Consultant
Wolf Management Consultants

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. This breakthrough concept has been applied to another kind of intense competition: the fast changing world of 21st century business.

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 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 inevitable points of diminishing return in your business concepts.

The Elements of Strategy

At its most basic level, strategy has four simple components: Where, What, How, and Finish. In the Prometheus Process, each of these elements is addressed by an "Imperative":

I: Design the Future
The first step in strategic thinking is to identify the future that you want to create...your Future Picture. It is a very firm, objective, measurable picture of the future you want to create. Accompanying it are Strategic Measures of Merit.

II: Target for Success
There are a very large number of things against which one can apply limited resources. You know intuitively that some of those things will have much higher impact than others. The business that targets the right things, the Centers of Gravity, will be far more effective, at a much lower cost, than those who have no disciplined way to choose and affect targets.

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 whatever resources are available to you... 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.

IV: Finish with Finesse
Every business cycle and product has a beginning and an end. Even though we know this to be the case, very few business owners, or organizations, plan for the back side of the inevitable cycle.

Prometheus Process Differentiators

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