What to Do When the Horse is Dead…

My good friend, Dr. Ron Ethridge, pastor of Woodward Avenue Baptist Church in Muscles Shoals, Alabama sent me the following article.

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 strategy is to dismount. However, in modern business, because of the heavy investment factors to be taken into consideration, often other strategies have to be tried with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a newer, better, and stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Appointing an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase the riders load share.
9. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
10. Change the form so that it reads: “This horse is not dead.”
11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
15. Do a time management study to see if the lighter riders would improve productivity.
16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better.
18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.
19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses
20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Are you riding a dead horse? Is there a more sane option you ought to follow than one of the 20 just named?

I would add the following antidote to riding a dead horse: just shoot it! Of to be more Christian in my thinking I would say, “If you are riding a dead horse, find a way to bury it and move on.”