The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
However, many organizations employ a variety of more advanced strategies, such as:
- Buying a stronger whip
- Changing riders
- Saying things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how others ride dead horses.
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
- Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
- Sending riders to training sessions to improve riding ability.
- Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment.
- Changing the requirements to declare that “This horse is not dead.”
- Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Reclassifying the dead horse as “living impaired.”
- Doing a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride the horse more cheaply.
- Purchasing a product that claims to make dead horses run faster.
- Hiring an outside contractor to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
- Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
- Saying, “This horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.”
- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
- Declaring that the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead (i.e. as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the mission of the organization than do some other horses)
- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
-From the Internet