As you go through life, managing business, developing and executing strategy, and moving sales forward you want to make sure to always ask yourself am I Riding a Dead Horse?
(from “A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints”)
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. When you find yourself riding a dead horse do you in fact get off or instead try one of the following;
- Buy a stronger whip.
- Change riders.
- Threaten the horse with termination.
- Say things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
- Appoint a committee to study the horse.
- Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
- Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
- Appoint a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
- Ride the dead horse “outside the box.”
- Buy a commercial off-the-shelf dead horse.
- Create a training session to increase our riding ability.
- Reclassify the dead horse as “living-impaired.”
- Compare the state of dead horses in today’s environment.
- Change the autopsy report to declare that “This horse is not dead.”
- Kill all the other horses, so this one will look the same.
- Name the dead horse “Paradigm Shift” and keep riding it.
- Ride the dead horse “smarter” not harder.
- Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
- Do a time management study to see if the lighter riders would improve productivity.
- Declare that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Call the dead horse a “joint venture” and let others ride it.
- Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
- Do a cost analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
- Purchase an aftermarket product to make dead horses run faster.
- Declare the horse is “better, faster, and cheaper” dead.
- Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
- Declare that “This horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.”
- Get the horse a Web site.
- Promote the horse to a supervisory position.
Remember – a Dead Horse is a Dead Horse. If you can discover it fast you can get off before it really starts to smell!
