A Dead Horse

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Things To Do With a Dead Horse


Chippewa tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in the world of business, we often try to employ other practices with dead horses, including the following:


1. Buying a bigger whip.
2. Changing riders
3. Telling ourselves, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other businesses to observe how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the minimum qualifications to ride a dead horse.
7. Appointing a blue ribbon task force to revive the dead horse.
8. Organizing a training session to improve our riding ability.
9. Comparing the prevalence of dead horses in today's environment with other periods in the economic cycle.
10. Changing the descriptive data contending that, "This horse is not dead."
11. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Announcing that, "No horse is too dead to flog."
14. Providing additional funding to augment the horse's performance.
15. Doing a Cost Analysis Study to determine if outside contractors can ride the dead horse cheaper.
16. Purchasing an add-on, after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Proclaiming that the horse is, "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisiting the performance requirements for horses.
20. Saying that this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promoting the dead horse to a Senior Vice President's position.
22. Shorten the track.
23. Establish benchmarks for industry dead-horse leaders
24. Put together a spiffy PowerPoint presentation to get planners to double the dead-horse R&D budget.
25. Get the horse a website.
26. Declare that the horse is not in fact dead, but poised for growth.
27. Sell off its ears to reduce overheads.
28. Re-organize the horse to make it more customer-facing, by cutting off its head and sewing it on backwards.
29. Declare that since horse is dead, we must now ride smarter, not harder.
30. Sell off the horse's legs one by one, until someone will buy it.
31. Declare that riding is not a core competency.


And let us not forget that we never, ever, ever, ask why the horse died.