Flogging A Dead Horse ?
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed from generation to generation, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in modern business, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including some of the following:
01. Buy a bigger whip.
02. Change riders.
03. Threaten the horse with termination.
04. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
05. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
06. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
07. Reclassify the dead horse as "living impaired".
08. Hire an outside contractor to ride the dead horse.
09. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Provide additional funding to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Conduct a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declare that the dead horse carries lower overhead, and therefore performs better
than some other horses.
13. Rewrite the expected performance parameters for all horses to accommodate the dead one.
14. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
I've been pondering the real wisdom in dismounting. The hard part sometimes is recognizing and accepting that some horses are, in fact, dead. As educators, we can not give up on kids, but we can discover that certain programs or processes are just not working--essentially, dead. We also may discover that what is not working for us may respond for someone else.
Changing metaphors, sometimes I need to remind myself that key to being an effective leader is in the refrain of a Kenny Rogers song:
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
Sometimes success is in walking away and not trying to flog our dead horse.
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