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Some humor for the CTO: Dakota Wisdom meets the enterprise

June 4, 2010 By

An enterprise technologist from government gave me this piece of humor and I wanted to share it here.  We can all use a laugh in these trying times, right?

I first saw a similar piece when serving in the Pentagon in the summer of 1997.  I heard a version repeated again by retired General Clapper at an intelligence community function. But like many other pieces of wisdom it keeps coming back around.  It has an enduring quality to it.

So here goes:  The CTO’s version of Dakota Wisdom

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 the world of the CTO, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:  When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to:

1. Buy a stronger whip.

2. Change riders.

3. Threaten the horse with termination.

4. Appoint a committee to study the horse.

5. Arrange to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.

6. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.

7. Reclassify the dead horse as “living impaired”.

8. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

9. Harness several dead horses together to increase the speed.

10. Provide additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

11. Do a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

12. Declare 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.

13. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses.

14. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

15. Establish a new CMMI and ITIL activity to optimize the dead horse.

16.  Roll out designs for a new customer-focused Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) leveraging the dead horse.

17.  Declare the dead horse to be part of your cloud computing strategy.

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About BobGourley

Bob Gourley is Crucial Point LLC’s founder and editor of CTOvision.com. Bob has received industry recognition including Infoworld top CTO award, AFCEA’s meritorious service award, and recognition as one of the top 100 “Tech Titans” in DC by Washingtonian magazine. He was named one of the “Top 25 Most Fascinating Communicators in Government IT.”

  • Bob Flores

    I WISH this was a great joke. Alas, I've seen each of these tactics used by various entities (gov't and commercial) over the years. Sigh.

    • http://crucialpointllc.com Bob Gourley

      I know Bob, in fact, this is one of those that makes you laugh till you realize you should be crying!

      Cheers,
      Bob

  • http://www.twiki.net Jeet

    hilarious!

    From the Dakota tribal wisdom, there's something profound about the Dakota's ability to bow down to what nature serves up, versus the more technologically and economically sophisticated folk thinking they can force the unnatural to happen. To make it even more challenging, these folk many times do make unnatural things happen.

    A couple of more unnatural things to do to a dead horse:
    - Give the dead horse a coach – sort of a horse whisperer
    - Do as the Japanese do – give the horse a "window seat" and let them sleep in meetings. Maybe they'll just go away on their own.
    - bring the founder of the dead horse company out of retirement to lead it to greatness
    - Figure out how to get the dead horse to water, because the next step is infinitely easier – getting it to drink.
    - teach it new tricks – retread programs can do wonders for dead wood, oops… horses.

    • http://crucialpointllc.com Bob Gourley

      Thanks Jeet. I have seen situations that remind me of those important points! Unfortunately.

      Bob

  • TheDotConnectj

    This is pure genius in the honored tradition of Scott Adams. Thanks for a great laugh!