- Joined
- Aug 17, 2003
- Messages
- 3,409
Tribal wisdom of the Blackfoot Indians (so legend has it), passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."
However, in government, education and the corporate world, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buy a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Give both horse and rider a good whipping.
4. Re-structuring the dead horse's reward scale to contain a performance-related element.
5. Suspending the horse's access to the executive grassy meadow until performance targets are met.
6. Make the horse work late shifts and weekends.
7. Scrutinize and take back a percentage of the horse's past 12 months expenses payments.
8. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
9. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
10. Convene a dead horse productivity improvement workshop.
11. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
12. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
13. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
14. Outsourcing the management of the dead horse.
15. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
16. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
17. Conduct a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
18. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
19. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And the always highly effective...
20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory or managerial position.
