Winning in FastTime: Harness the Competitive Advantage of Prometheus in Business and Life John A. Warden III Leland A. Russell

Winning In FastTime® is based on a fundamental assumption.
You won't win in the 21st century by merely reacting to change, or making incremental improvements to maintain your current position. To win, you must decide what you want your tomorrow to be, and then make it happen faster than the rate of change in your competitive environment.

Winning In FastTime® provides a systematic and proven process for designing and implementing superior strategies.
The process itself is straightforward enough to grasp readily, yet sophisticated enough to use for projects of any scope and complexity. It guides you to focus on the future and to decide what the real measurements of success need to be; it teaches you how to find the right "targets" for action which will give you the most return on your energy; it shows you how to think about different organizational concepts; and it leads you to plan as carefully for the end of products and business cycles as for the beginnings.

Winning In FastTime® is a fractal approach.
This means that the same process pattern can be repeated over and over at an ever-smaller scale. This fractal approach builds a deep level of understanding, commitment and alignment as each division, department and unit of the organization becomes engaged. It requires a common strategic vocabulary that is shared across the organization. When everyone from the boardroom to the front line is thinking and acting strategically using the same terminology, the effect is like a nuclear chain-reaction. The human energy and results expand exponentially.

Why is it necessary for the whole organization to engage in designing, as well as implementing, strategy?

The traditional approach in which people are expected to embrace and implement a strategic plan developed in isolation by a senior executive team, or worse yet, by an outside consulting firm, is roughly akin to a football team on which only the quarterback knows the plays. Experience shows that people won't embrace something they don't fully understand, especially if they feel no sense of ownership.

To engage the whole organization in creating and executing winning plans, you need a common framework for strategic thinking, planning and implementing strategic thinking. Winning In FastTime® provides that framework and, once approach is incorporated by an organization, everyone can move forward together in FastTime.

Most importantly, people will no longer be thinking like bricklayers. Bricklayers are specialists but are usually not concerned about the larger issues, such as how the community should be organized, or what the purpose of the buildings should be. They are primarily concerned about the details of construction—How many bricks will we need? How high should this wall be?

Winning In FastTime® helps people think like an architect, rather than a bricklayer. It engages as many people as possible in the process of answering four strategic questions.