When Riding a Dead Horse
Milpitas community wisdom says, “When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” But in Milpitas businesses, the city government and (sometimes) our schools often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Saying things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
- Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
- Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
- Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
- Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment vs. in history.
- Changing the requirements, declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
- Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
- Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
- Funding a study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
- Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster.
- Declaring the horse is “better, faster and cheaper dead.”
- Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
- Revisiting the performance requirements for horses.
- Saying this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.