Indians have a very famous proverb that says:
“When you see your horse dead, dismount”
This proverb became so famous that it is called the “dead horse theory” in the management literature.
You may think that this sentence is very obvious, but it is not.
We all have many “dead horses”. Let me give some examples:
You see many companies and organizations that are officially bankrupt, or sell a product for which there is no longer a demand, or we ourselves buy a share in the stock market that we lost and have no hope of profiting from. In these cases, instead of getting off the “dead horse”, we do strange things, what do we do?
What is the characteristic of those who have a “dead horse”?
1. They buy a new whip.
They believe that if the horse does not move, it is because of our whip, and the whip should be changed and hit harder to make the dead horse move. For example, we constantly buy on a stock that is not going to grow, or we equip production for a product that has no market for sale.
2. We change the rider.
Those who have a “dead horse” believe that we always used this method and got answers, so now the rider must be changed. In the company, they fire employees or, for example, they go to the stock market in vip channels and when they lose, they go to another vip channel.
3. They form a committee.
They appoint a committee to investigate how to improve the performance of the dead horse. For example, in the company, they form pointless brainstorming sessions, or they see a family member doing a lot of unethical things, they get together and decide to get married in order to be guided to the right path.
4. We lower the standards.
The standard is lowered to include the “dead horse” and the dead horse is classified under the “live still” class.
For example, in the stock market, for a losing stock, they say that I bought this stock with a long-term view, or to justify the poor performance, we find a case worse than ourselves and say, look, there is someone worse than me.
5⃣ Normalization
We consider the performance of the “dead horse” to be normal and the performance of other horses to be ideal, so why should we change?
6. Cost increase
We increase the salary of the dead horse’s board of directors to keep the motivation of the managers, or for example we force our child to study medicine and when he doesn’t study due to lack of interest, we give him a reward to motivate him.
Drop the dead horse
Let’s stop rationalizing and be realistic, a dead horse does not come back to life, the cost of keeping a “dead horse” is too high, not only does it not give us a ride, but it also sets us back altogether.
Take a look at your company to see how many dead horse units there are in the company.
Let’s put aside the “dead horse” in our lives as well.
This post is written by shadmanamini