"Decide what you want and decide what you are willing to exchange for it.  Establish your priorities and go to work." - H.L. Hunt

I am willing to bet that many of you work in an organization that currently has at least one failed project, product or service that still exists.  Like an albatross around the organization's neck, the failure languishes on the portfolio, consuming resources and attention.  Day after day, additional time, money and effort are thrown at the failure in the hope that it can be turned around and made a success.  Forget the fact that the ROI went negative six months ago and will likely never tread positive territory.  Its a pet project or an "all in" bet from some executive.  Doesn't matter...its a loser!

Many of you have seen this...but for those who haven't...pick out the "sad but true" examples from your organization:

Tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians (so legend has it), 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 government, education and the corporate world, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Giving horse and rider a good beating
• Re-structuring the dead horse's reward scale to contain a performance-related element.
• Suspending the horse's access to the executive grassy meadow until performance targets are met.
• Making the horse work late shifts and weekends.
• Scrutinizing and clawing back a percentage of the horse's past 12 months expenses payments.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses
• Convening a dead horse productivity improvement workshop.
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
• Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Outsourcing the management of the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
• Declaring 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.
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

The amount of money that gets wasted on the aforementioned resuscitation efforts is staggering!  Imagine what you could do with the dollars, time, effort that get thrown down the abyss! 

And that's the point of this blog entry...you don't have to imagine!  You simply need to have the courage to kill the crap and deal with the fact that "sunk cost" cannot be retrieved, saved or salvaged.  Put your big money, your dedicated time, your best resources into the winning ideas.  Make the tough decisions and kill what needs to be killed!

Easier said than done...right?!?  Here are some tips on how to make the tough decisions:

• Form an innovation council, whose entire role is to constantly review the idea/innovation project portfolio and cull poor performing initiatives in favor of ideas that show true promise
• Create a balanced scorecard, dashboard, metrics or other systems of measurement so you can quickly identify project issues
• Separate the idea generation portion of your innovation management system from the prototyping/project execution portion.  This will protect the ideas that are still developing from the critical review that mature concepts should constantly face
• Be certain of your strategy and goals.  If you understand what you want/need, it will make the decisions about what you should keep vs. kill pretty straightforward
• My Favorite: Establish a mandate that each department, area, project portfolio, etc. select one or two things to kill each quarter.  This forces product sunsets, legacy decommissions, flushing out waste and killing good ideas that just didn't seem to catch on in the marketplace. 

These are tough decisions.  Someone is going to get their "nose bent out of joint" because you just killed the thing they worked on for the past three years.  Too damned bad!  Business isn't about nostalgia...its about profit!  If you can't make money on it...fix it or kill it!  This goes for ideas as well as products or services. 

Know what works and why.  Know what doesn't work and why.  Know where your investments in the future are paying off.  Know where your "money pits" are located.  Demand accountability.  Demand excellence.  Be a decision maker.  Be a leader.