A simpleminded person might say that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
Modern organizations — often run by people with magnificant-sounding educations — employ other strategies, including 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 so that dead horses can be included.
- Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired”.
- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
- 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.
- Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And if all else fails:
Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.