Beating a Dead Horse - Here's How

Our Principal, Mark Gavoor, met with Lon Blumenthal today.   According to Mark, "Lon is an impressive supply chain thinker and consultant." 

Mark and Lon discussed many shared issues and concerns in the management consulting profession.  Among the many things they discussed was the ineffective management practice of beating a dead horse.  Lon pointed Mark to a discussion posting by one Tom Snell, a Project and Account Manager at an electrical contracting firm in Southern California, on LinkedIn. Them observations are both brilliant and funny.  What often makes funny things brilliant is often the degree to which they reflect the truth.  And there is a lot of truth in these observations.

Here they are:

Beating A Dead Horse

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in government we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Mandate a stronger whip in the event that horse is just sleeping.
2. Assign a rider that has better dead horse riding abilities.
3. Promote the statement "This is the safest way and the way we have always ridden this horse."
4. Assembling a team to research and visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
5. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
6. Appointing a team of experts to study revival options for the dead horse.
7. Creating a course of training to increase our riding ability of dead horses.
8. Launching a study to determine the state of dead horses in today's environment.
9. Pass legislation declaring that "This horse is not dead."
10. Research the option of blaming the horse's parents for it’s unridability.
11. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
12. Adopt the stance that "No horse is too dead to beat." And that continued beating may in fact revive the horse.
13. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
14. Do a Cost Analysis to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
15. Procure a commercially designed dead horse to study the options and features available.
16. Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
17. Form an action group to find uses for dead horses.
18. Modify and/or amend the performance requirements for horses.
19. Identify the procurement cost of said dead horse as an independent variable.
20. DBRAC (Defense Base Realignment and Closure) the horse farm on which it was born.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position 

A few of these need to be edited for corporate America since they are more from a government or government contractor point of view. 

[9]  Issue an all employee email from the CEO stating that the horse is not dead.

[15]  Benchmark other companies to determine world class best practices dead horse design, management, and beating

[20]  Downsize and overwork those remaining to beat the dead horse even more. 

Of course everyone should feel free to edit and adapt these little gems for specific organizations and circumstances.

We will certainly use these gems.  In doing so, we will credit both Lon and Tom.