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23/03/2004: "What I learned in 5 1/2 years of business studies"

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismout. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses including the following:

1. Buy a stronger whip.
2. Change riders.
3. Say things like "This is the way we always have ridden this horse".
4. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
5. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Rewrite the standards for dead horse performance.
7. Appoint a "tiger team" to revive the dead horse.
8. Create a training session to increase riding ability.
9. Compare the state of dead horses in today's environment.
10. Change the requirements declaring that "this horse is not dead".
11. Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed and pulling power.
13. Declare that "no horse is too dead to beat".
14. Provide additional incentive funding to increase the horse's performance.
15. Do a CA study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16. Purchase a software product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare the horse is "better, faster, and cheaper" dead.
18. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
20. Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent value.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
22. Shorten the track.
23. Establish benchmarks for industry dead-horse leaders.
24. Gather other dead animals and announce a diversity program.
25. Put together a spiffy PowerPoint presentation to get planners to double the dead-horse R&D budget.
26. Get the horse a web site.