Beating a dead horse

This piece came to me from Major James Sloan.  It describes common business strategies for avoiding reality.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following: Buy a stronger whip. Change riders. Threaten the horse with termination. Say things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.” Appoint a committee to study the horse. Arrange to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included. Appoint a tiger team to revive the dead horse. Ride the dead horse “outside the box.” Buy a commercial off-the-shelf dead horse. Create a training session to increase our riding ability. Reclassify the dead horse as “living-impaired.” Compare the state of dead horses in today’s environment. Change the autopsy report to declare that “This horse is not dead.” Kill all the other horses, so this one will look the same. Name the dead horse “Paradigm Shift” and keep riding it. Ride the dead horse “smarter” not harder. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed. Do a time management study to see if the lighter riders would improve productivity. Declare that “No horse is too dead to beat.” Call the dead horse a “joint venture” and let others ride it. I found it on the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty Facebook page under the title "Dead Horse Theory of Government" and a few more ideas were added: Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance. Do a cost analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper. Purchase an aftermarket product to make dead horses run faster. Declare the horse is “better, faster, and cheaper” dead. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses. Declare that “This horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.” Get the horse a Web site. Promote the horse to a supervisory position.  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. Declare that at this point, what difference does it make? In this election season, I am hearing a lot of these ideas.  From now on, I'll just refer to them as "dead horse theories."