Tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians (legend has it), that was passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in many organizations, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Giving horse and rider a good bollocking.
• Re-structuring the dead horse’s reward scale to contain a performance-related element.
• Making the horse work late shifts and weekends.
• Suspending the horse’s access to the executive grassy meadow until performance targets are met.
• Scrutinising and clawing back a percentage of the horse’s past 12 months expenses payments.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses.
• Convening a dead horse productivity improvement workshop.
• 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.
• Outsourcing the management of the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
• Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

Finally, there is the highly effective…

• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.