Saturday, September 16, 2006

How to Ride a Dead Horse

Another gift from the internet. I truly cannot tell who first wrote this, as it is all over the web.

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), because heavy investment factors are taken into consideration, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including 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. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living-impaired".
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Does this ring a bell, with you?

How I Would Use This

I would get small groups to pick one of the 14 points and give an anonymous or generic example of it.

#10 - an example of this might be the money that is poured into giving homeless people on the street increased training opportunities.

This could be a lot of fun.

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