Having spent 30 years in the Financial Services industry I am now happier and more fulfilled by my ‘portfolio career’ of farming, writing and art. This post sums up for me the corporate world that I am grateful to interact with but to have left behind.
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.
In modern enterprises, one finds a whole range of far more advanced strategies such as:
- Appointing a committee to study the horse
- Buying a stronger whip
- Arranging to visit other countries to determine how others ride dead horse
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
- Threatening the horse with termination
- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance
- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
- Declaring that as the dead horse does not need to be fed nor watered, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position
Having more fun now!
