posted 09-23-2002 05:52 PM               

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. And, as a final strategy:
    
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Sound like any place you know

Steve H

posted 09-23-2002 11:18 PM               

I like it, but an alternate strategy is:

A) Give the dead horse multiple warnings of poor performance.

B) Terminate (somehow redundant?) the dead horse after multiple meetings and approvals.

c) Offer the dead horse a long severance package.

D) Blame the dead horse for all the companies ills after it has left.

E) Rehire the dead horse as a consultant right away.

Of course my favorite strategy is to fire the person who found and mentioned the dead horse in the first place.

posted 11-02-2002 02:57 PM               

I have been away far too long. Thanks for the laugh!