The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the' best strateqy is to DISMOUNT!! However, in modern business and government, because of the heavy investment of actors to be taken into consideration, often other strategies have to be tried with dead horses, 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. Appointing an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse. Creating a training session to increase the rider's load share. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living-impaired." Changing the form so that it reads: "This horse is not dead." Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed. Donating the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance. Doing a time management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity. Purchasing an after-market product to make dead horses run faster. Declaring that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better. Forming a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for dead horses. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position. Back to Dispatch April 2001 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com