When riding a dead horse, you should dismount

Infer what you wish from this shamelessly stolen borrowed set of options to the question: When riding a dead horse, what do you do?

1.Buy a stronger whip.

2.Assert “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”

3.Arrange to visit other sites to benchmark how they ride dead horses.

4.Provide additional training to increase riding ability.

5.Outsource to private contractors to see if they can ride the dead horse cheaper.

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

7.Declare that, as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

8.Commission a study to identify ways to improve dead horses through incremental enhancements, such as adding wheels.

9.Rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses.

10.Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Or, as Ted Knicker’s presentation on public diplomacy goes, follow tribal wisdom "passed on from generation to generation, [that] says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."