The piece below is quite old and rather well known, but it’s absolutely excellent and I couldn’t help having it here…
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In business, however, it seems that we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
- Buying a stronger whip
- Changing riders
- Threatening the horse with termination
- Saying things like „This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
- Appoint a committee to study the horse
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
- Appoint a tiger team to revive the dead horse
- Re-classify the dead horse as ?living, impaired?
- Create a training session to increase our riding ability
- Compare the state of dead horses in today’s environment
- Change the requirements declaring that „This horse is not dead.”
- Hire contractors to ride the dead horse
- Attempt to mount multiple dead horses in hopes that one of them will spring to life
- Harness several dead horses together for increased speed
- Declare that „No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance
- Do a CA Study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper
- Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster
- Declare the horse is „better, faster and cheaper” dead
- Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses
- Do a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse?s performanc
- Revisit the performance requirements for all horses
- Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable
- Declare that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses
- Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position
And how do you ride your dead horse?