The Friday Joke - Dead Horse Theory

I am grateful to Dan at the Barnet Bugle for the tweet which alerted me to the We Love Local Government blog which I have looked at before and is worth keeping an eye on (must go and link to it if I have not already done so). They were a little concerned about borrowing the blog post from someone else but a quick search of the internet shows this to be an old joke and it is as true today as it ever was.

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The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that; “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in local government, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Telling everyone that we’ve always ridden our horses this way
8. Benchmarking our horse against dead horses ridden by other authorities
9. Hiring external contractors to resuscitate the dead horse
10. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
11. Hiring outside consultants to put together a training programme to support staff to work better with the dead horse
12. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
13. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
14. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
15. 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.
16. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses
17. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position
18. Naming a dead horse "One Barnet"