Yet another bit of Business Wisdom: Dead Horse Syndrome

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 in modern business (and education and government) heavy investment or other considerations may encourage other strategies:

- Bying a stronger whip.

- Changing riders.

- Threatening the horse with termination.

- Appointing a committee to study the horse.

- Visiting other sites to see how they ride dead horses.

- Lowering the standards to include dead hourses.

- Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired”.

- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

- Declaring that the dead horse requires less overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line.

- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

- Promoting the dead horse to management.

PDF-Datei
This post was downloaded by 1912 people until now.