Conventional wisdom explains that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In business, however, we often try other strategies with dead horses, including:
- Buying better whips
- Changing riders
- Claiming, “It’s the way we’ve always ridden dead horses”
- Appointing committees to study dead horses
- Visiting other sites to see how they ride dead horses
- *Establishing different riding standards for dead horses
- Creating select teams to revive dead horses
- Conducting economic impact studies to evaluate dead horses in today’s environment
- *Changing the definition of dead horses and then declaring, “These horses are not dead”.
- Outsourcing the riding of dead horses.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed
- Declaring, “No dead horse is too dead to ride”.
- Providing more funds to enhance the performance of dead horses.
- Researching how to ride dead horses more cheaply
- *Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster
- *Rationalising that dead horses are better, faster and cheaper.
- Forming quality circles to find new uses for dead horses.
- Proclaiming that dead horses can be purchased well below their market value
- Recycling dead horses
- Restructuring compensation packages for dead horses
- Promoting dead horses to supervisory positions.
From No One Ever Went Broke Making a Profit by Charles Kaiser Jr.