Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

Dr. Spencer Johnson
Putnam publishing Group

Business books rarely make the transition to a wider audience. Those that address the softer skills stand a better chance and there are a growing number of these, and alarmingly they are listed under business, self development and New Age. The majority are American and leave the British reader in cringe mode.

One of the most successful of these books is a small (94 pages long), offering from Dr. Spencer Johnson, who was the co-author of the very successful book “The One Minute Manager”. “Who Moved My Cheese” has been around for a while and keeps cropping up in lists of business books one should read. It is still selling phenomenally well in the USA, Amazon.com have it listed as a top 50 seller. Its success has been cemented by the fact that there are already at least two pastiches of the book out, another business phenomenon, if you can’t be original cash in on someone else’s success by writing a parody.

Is “Cheese” a business book? Only peripherally. The book is about dealing with change, something that impacts us all and more than once. As some wise philosopher commented, “The only constant is change”. Most people are uncomfortable with change and within the business context this has a major impact as we are constantly confronted with rapid and often disruptive change and the inability to confront and cope with change has a measurable economic impact on any organisation or for that matter society.

Johnson’s method is to use a parable, a childlike story of two mice and two “littlepeople”, who live in a maze. One day they find a roomful of cheese. Everyday the four go back to this room to feed on the cheese. The littlepeople become complacent and unquestioning about the cheese and where it came from and why it’s there and in fact how long it will last. The cheese represents fulfilment and happiness and anything else that one is looking for in life.

One day the store of cheese that the four have been living on disappears. The mice being rather simple take off into the maze to find more cheese. The two others, Hem and Haw, as their names suggest, act indecisively, they “Hem” and “Haw” about their situation. Their initial disbelief turns to anger and outrage. The cheese is so important to them that they can’t let go of it and they refuse to do anything about finding more cheese, instead they return daily to the same place in the faint hope that the cheese will somehow reappear.

It takes one of them to overcome his fear and change his belief system, a realization that without change there is only extinction – life moves on. Learning to laugh at himself and his former complacency Haw ventures back into the maze. Haw uses the question, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” as his guiding principle. Progressively overcoming his fear and then positively enjoying the adventure he eventually finds an even greater store of cheese. The two mice have been there for some time.

Hem in the meantime has come up with every justification as to why he should do nothing, citing old age, comfort and fear of the unknown, (the maze and the search for new cheese) and remains glued to the empty room.

As the story moves on Haw regularly scrawls motivational and other thoughts on the wall both to inspire him and hopefully to guide Hem, and the rest of us who are resisting change. Some are, dare I say it “cheesy”, yet others are thought provoking. Johnson runs through the gamut of emotional questions and mental barriers we erect to stop us changing in response to a changing environment.

Does the book achieve what it sets out to do? The parable is certainly a better way of getting a message across, yet this book on first reading appears to be too simplistic. Longer reflection however made me realise that despite my instant put down of the book as American trite, I could recall quite a lot of the story and what’s more I have used it to get the message across to others.

The book is not original but it does bring a different way of approaching change management. In the context of Social Enterprise, practitioners are engendering change and encountering barriers and complacency, maybe reading this book or better still getting others to read it might actually achieve the desired results.

Uday Thakkar
Red Ochre