Sometimes as a consultant I find myself called in to help clients who can best be described as caught in the act of flogging a dead horse. When that happens you don't need a consultant. You need a new horse. (Of course, a good consultant can find you a new horse or a better form of transport. That's another story.)In case you're not open to that, here's a time honored list of consultants' favorite alternatives:
- Buy a stronger whip.
- Change riders.
- Say things like "This is the way we always have ridden this horse."
- Appoint a committee to study the horse.
- Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
- Rewrite the standards for dead horse performance: "Stability is good."
- Appoint a dead horse revival team.
- Hope for spontaneous horse revival.
- Create a training session on riding dead horses.
- Compare the state of dead horses in today's environment.
- Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
- Hire contractors, (or consultants), to ride the dead horse for you.
- Harness several dead horses together to increase speed and pulling power.
- Declare that "No horse is too dead to beat."
- Provide additional incentive funding to increase the horse's performance.
- Purchase a software 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.
- Say this horse was procured with cost and performance as independent variables.
- Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
- Shorten the track.
- Establish industry benchmarks for dead-horse leaders.
- Gather other dead animals and announce a diversity program.
- Put together a PowerPoint presentation to get planners to double the dead-horse R&D budget.
- Create a spreadsheet and graphs showing how much cheaper deadhorses are because they don't eat much and never complain about poor working conditions.
- Get the horse a website.
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