Sunday, April 16, 2006

Does This Sound Like Any School District In Which You've Taught?

From an email:

Wisdom says, "When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." In business, government and (sometimes) education often other strategies are tried with dead horses, including the following:
· Buying a stronger whip.
· Changing riders.
· Saying things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
· Appointing a committee to study the horse.
· Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
· Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
· Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
· Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
· Comparing the state of dead horses in today's environment vs. in history.
· Changing the requirements, declaring, "This horse is not dead."
· Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse.
· Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
· Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
· Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
· Funding a study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
· Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster.
· Declaring the horse is "better, faster and cheaper dead."
· Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
· Revisiting the performance requirements for horses.
· Saying this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
· Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Update, 6:11 pm: Are there any others you've experienced or can imagine? Add a comment!

2 comments:

  1. Yes it sounds like very district I have worked for, both public and private. It is the voice of big business jsut before it goes down. It sounds like the american car industry just before the japanese cars took over.

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  2. Greetings from the other coast! I loved this; thanks for posting it. Tried to pick a favorite, but couldn't.

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