This paper investigates a preprocessing technique for a multiuser MIMO downlink system. An efficient joint precoder design with adaptive power allocation is proposed by adopting the channel-diagonalization technique and the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. By exploiting an MMSE-based decoder, we propose an iterative algorithm to design the precoder with further derived closed-form solutions for implementing adaptive power allocation. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Compared with conventional benchmark schemes, they show that our proposal matches the performance but with reduced computational complexity.