Horses and so forth

The basic reasoning of the American Indian—”When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, including:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures 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 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.
• Denying that the dead horse is dead, but only asleep.
• And of course, everyone’s favorite: Promoting the dead horse to a management position.