Dakota Sioux tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. But people who manage businesses and other organizations often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
- Buying a bigger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Assuring newcomers that "this is the way we've always ridden this horse."
- Appointing a committee or taskforce to study the horse situation.
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses there.
- Raising standards for riders of dead horses.
- Appointing a Tiger Team to revive the dead horse.
- Developing a new training program to improve everyone's riding ability.
- Analyzing the meaning of dead horses in the context of current social, economic, and legislative trends.
- Redefining basic terms so that it can rightly be said that "This horse is not dead."
- Hiring temps to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase their potential.
- Demonstrating that no horse is too dead to beat.
- Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
- Doing a cost analysis to see if contractors might be able to ride the horse more cheaply.
- Investing in new technology designed to make dead horses run faster.
- Announcing at employee meetings and in press releases that the horse is in fact "better, faster, and cheaper" dead.
- Establishing a consortium to find new uses for dead horses.
- Reporting to shareholders that this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
- When all else fails, promoting the dead horse to a management position.
-- Unknown Source
