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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