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Riding a Dead Horse
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians,
passed 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,
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
determine 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 of the other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance
requirements of all horses
and as a final strategy.......
14. Promoting the dead horse to a
supervisory position.
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