Beating a dead Horse
The tribal wisdom of the Lakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
However, in modern enterprises, because the objectives of management are often illogically focused on the performance of a particular horse rather than rationally on the completion of the journey, other strategies sometimes have to be tried, including, but not limited to the following:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Threatening the horse with termination.
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
- Lowering the standards to include dead horses.
- Appointing an intervention team to re-animate the dead horse.
- Creating a training session to increase the rider’s load share.
- Re-classify the dead horse as living-impaired.
- Change the form so that it reads: “This horse is not dead”
- Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
- Process map the current and future route of the dead horse.
- Introduce a conformance policy which clearly indicates accountability of riders for the health of their horses.
- Do a time management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity.
- Introduce an incentive scheme to encourage dead horses to run faster.
- Declare that a dead horse has a lower overhead and, therefore, performs better.
- Form a quality focus group to find ways of improving the efficiency of dead horses.
- Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.
- Promote the dead horse to a management position.
