The tribal wisdom of
the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to
the next, says that when you discover you are riding
a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
However, in modern business, because of the heavy
investment factors to be taken into consideration,
often other strategies have to be tried with dead
horses, including the following:
- Threatening the
horse with termination.
- Appointing 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.
- Appointing an
intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.
- Creating a
training session to increase the riders load
share.
- Reclassifying
the dead horse as living-impaired.
- Change the form
so that it reads: "This horse is not
dead."
- Hire outside
contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harness several
dead horses together for increased speed.
- Donate the dead
horse to a recognized charity, thereby
deducting its full original cost.
- Providing
additional funding to increase the horse's
performance.
- Do a time
management study to see if the lighter riders
would improve productivity.
- Purchase an
after-market product to make dead horses run
faster.
- Declare that a
dead horse has lower overhead and therefore
performs better.
- Form a quality
focus group to find profitable uses for dead
horses.
- Rewrite the
expected performance requirements for horses.
- Promote the
dead horse to a supervisory position.
