STRATEGIES FOR DEALING WITH DEAD HORSES

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a
dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we
often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like "This is the way we always have ridden this horse."
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in today's environment.
10. Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
11. Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
15. Do an outsourcing study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16 Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
20. Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Question: What do these humorous comments suggest about organizational rationality?

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i heard reference to this at a conference that i spoke at in Venice. GREAT line. how do we deal with those dead horses in our lives? no idea where the original came from.

Kasian architects are hosting the meeting [www.kasian.com] in their office that is located on the water in downtown. great place. they did the fabulous airport expansion which i came thru yesterday. it is full of light and is really easy to move thru.

the USA is the world's largest island. but it also has had a great can do attitude. can this continue???

THE MORE GLOBAL WE BECOME, THE MORE REGIONAL WE MUST BECOME. ....... you cant make the model global. it is important to remember that every place is different. every context is different. we cannot export the solution model to other places around the world.

The Design Futures Council Board.
discussion around the current economic situation. Bullish or bearish for the near term market?
There seems to be a belief in the room that the market will remain strong for exporting work, and there is a focus on emerging markets. The discuss turned to repositioning of prices. There was a feeling of a readjustment to a more sane cost/price structure. There will be a wave of new ways of procuring infrastructure [ie PPP]. The big issue is how we can work better and smarter. A period of correction where many of the really bad ideas and bad projects will move to the wayside.

What we will be doing differently one year from now?
HGA [Steve] largest market is healthcare. They have integrated industrial engineering into their offer. They are also really looking at ‘lean design’ which has really caught on in the healthcare industry. They have also brought in more process orientated individuals into the practice. They feel that it has given them an edge and has really enhanced their success factors. Next step is to find ways to measure the outcomes with their clients. They see that thy will continue to push upstream and focus even more on integrated delivery. Sutter Health is leading on this in California. Thre is also a feeling that the sustainability issue

Cannon Design [Kent] is looking at their four business areas and working on integrating more. They are also engaging in primary research.

Design Workshop [doug] we feel that we will be spending more time up front and more time at the back end. This is due to increased pressure from the public which is driving more now. This is more in planning than in execution of the projects. The clients are being pressured by the public for this now. The public is demanding to ‘be heard’ so the up-front design services are more necessary. The challenge is to come up with good metrics for all parties involved.

Service Industry. accounts for 85% of GDP of USA, average of 70% of GDP of other OCED countries. classical Agricultural, Industry, Services. another way to look at this is as follows: Extractive, Transformative, Producer , Personal, Distributive, Non-marketed. roadmaps of 13 sectors have been completed. questions focused on - state of art, drivers, long-term outlook.
1. Health Care is the second largest service sector in the world. it is over 15% of GDP in the US, average of 9% of GDP in other OCED. one of the greatest growth areas will be ICT in the health sector, especially around proactive fitness and wellness.
2. Construction Industry.
3. Technology Industry. focus is really on transitioning the machine groups to service groups.

service systems are quite complex and interdisciplinary requiring T-shaped skills
1. Business - propose (win-win), Finance, Market, Manage, plus eServices & eMarkets
2. Social-Organizational - Coordinate, motivate, govern, learn, plus eServices & eMarkets
3. technology - make, verify, deliver, operate, plus eServices & eMarkets
[notes attributed to Jim Spohrer]

this session went over the activities of the various geographies. it was quite interesting to hear of the different scales. they ranges from Poland, which has a target of becoming a road economy like the US to China which has a clear expectation to become multi-modal. There are over 40 major urban rail projects in planning and construction so that by 2020, there will be 100,000 km with 13,000 km of high speed lines in place.

Malcolm Gibson - MTR - gave a really interesting talk. there is an evolution of expectations in HK as far as comfort is concerned. this has reduced the total capacity of the lines from 85,000 per hour to 70,000 per hour. they have a good bit of money and will be investing $HK120,000,000,000 over the next ten years. he described the express rail link that is being built to link to Shenshen and on north to Shanghai and Beijing. This is being built without knowing he ultimate capacity, but as he said, they know it is the right thing to do. the amount of the work which the MTR are planning is absolutely phenomenal.

he noted that as part of the design management they have arrangement in which the design team much be co-located in the MTR offices; preliminary design is generally based on time charging and detailed design on a lump sum.

their selection of consultants is based on :
1. best team for the job
2. fair assessment of proposals
3. focus on the technical expertise and ability to deliver
4. appropriate fees
5. low bid excluded
6. no cut throat proposal accepted
7. understanding of the projects
8. team structure and its commitment to the job
9. organization and staffing
10. interview of the team is the MIOST important - we want to know if we like them or not

Chairman LM Lui opened talking about the constellations. they are there only because we make them real. they are essentially dreams which become real thru our imagination....you need to be able to 'free your heart' from what you assume to be real.

Colin Stewart, chair of the sector, gave an opening on the business stats. it has been a good year and looks to be another good one. he noted that all of the carbon emissions for this event would be offset. he presented the New Rail Business framework. it looks really impressive. I had not idea that our offer and skill sets were so wide and varied. he spoke of many things and focused on the results of an internal competition: the common results that appeared were: freedom of choice, carbon footprint, alternative power, technologies, personalization, economics, integrated journeys, information and IT, urban context and planning.

Peter Broch - Asian Development Bank [ADB] [http://www.adb.org/] - he has a special focus in southeast asia. he presented some amazing figures. the poverty in asia has been dropping drastically. the number of statistically poor has dropped to about 50% today. the challenge is that this group has also grown by 1 billion to about 2 billion. this is an interesting fact. the main objective of the ADB to lower poverty. he noted that Viet Nam has the most most liberal rail laws in the world. anyone can come in an build and operate a new rail line. anyone. this not fond anywhere else in the world. they provide funding at very favourable rates to develop, the most iportant thing for us, is to contiue to give good advice that is culturally appropriate.

TG Chew - Bombardier [http://www.bombardier.com/en/1_0/1_19/index.html or http://www.bombardier.com/index.jsp?id=1_0&lang=en&file=/en/1_0/1_0.jsp]

Their vision for mass transit systems in the future should include the following:
1. 24 hour operation with no down time
2. greater frequency and capacity
3. energy efficiency with low resource consumption
4. improved security and safety
5. comfort and more facility for passengers
6. driver-less and integrated systems
7. attractive design that blend with the city
8. fundamentally sustainable development

he described some of the innovations that they are implementing. however, it does seem that they are playing catch-up to both the automotive and airline industries as far as the utilization of information is concerned. hard to understand, really, how their model works. one idea that they have is to have load weighted fresh air introduction in winter in cold areas. most important is the driver style on energy consumption. he noted in an aside that the ideal scenario would be for the entire side of the car to zip/flip open to allow loading all along the length rather than at single apertures....and then to roll/zip closed..... could we design this? another challenge is to fundamentally lower the weight of the carriage. every ton has to be carried....so the biggest challenge is to safely reduce the overall weight of the carriage, including the drive train. he further noted that the industry needs to take a good hard look at how to use what they have better. this does not imply radical change [of course he would not be interested in that as this is an amazingly conservative industry] but rather an effective utilization of the things that the industry already knows.

he was a pretty good salesman.