Flogging a dead horse

I always read Stuart Jones’ BusinessMatters blog so I’m not sure how I missed this post about the tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians which says that "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, we can probably all think of examples from business and the public sector that are similar to these:

  • Changing Riders
  • Appointing a committee to study the horse
  • Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses
  • Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
  • Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired"
  • Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
  • Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance
  • Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance
  • Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position

I’ve added one of my own:

  • Giving the dead horse early retirement and then bringing it back as a consultant

Visit BusinessMatters to see the full list.

Tags: business, productivity, government, public sector

One Reply to “Flogging a dead horse”

Comments are closed.