The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
But I have discovered during my long business career that modern business because of heavy investment factors, other strategies are often tried with dead horses. Some of those strategies include the following:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horses.
8. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired."
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase their speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if a lighter rider would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declaring that the dead horse carries less overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than a live horse.
13. rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
14. and as a final strategy:
PROMOTING THE DEAD HORSE TO A SUPERVISORY POSITION.
