A WHILE BACK, we discussed the idea that the most successful ideas in business were the really simple, direct ones–even the ones that were so simple they were impracticably stupid.
Since then, I’ve found wht might be the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever made–Who Moved My Cheese?
It was written by Spencer Johnson, who’s made a career out of easy-reading material for self-improvers. His most famous was The One-Minute Manager, which launched a fleet of sequels including The One-Minute Father (don’t way too many guys treat fatherhood as a one-minute experience already, or maybe a five-minute experience with Viagra?).
Anyhoo, Who Moved My Cheese? has an extremely simple lesson–change is inevitable; learn to enjoy the adventure.
It teaches this lesson with a very short, very simply-written parable. It’s a story set in a maze, involving two lab mice and two mouse-sized but human-minded “littlepeople.”
As the story opens, our four maze-runners have found a cache of cheese and decide to stop their daily running. They settle down by the cheese station and feast heartily. But as the days go by, the cheese supply keeps getting staler and smaller. One day, it’s all gone.
After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, the two mice set off in search of “New Cheese.” The Littlepeople sit around moaning and asking the titular question, until one of them (named Haw) finally gets mad enough to act.
As he heads back out into the maze, he realizes he always liked his old life of running around for cheese. He has a sequence of epiphanies about the value of change and adapting to new life conditions, and writes each on the maze walls (in the book, they’re printed as full-page slogans).
Haw finally finds the New Cheese, which the mice already are now at. The story ends with Haw hoping the other Littleperson (named “Hem”) will eventually get off his Littleass and get back into the maze.
Johnson wants us to get our heads in gear to the inevitabily of change. Accept that your job’s going to be downsized; your home’s going to be demolished for luxury condos; your current job skills are going to become worthless in four years or less; your neighborhood store’s going to be clobbered by Wal-Mart; your dot-com’s going to go phhhhft. But it’ll all be to your betterment; just as long as you get with it, give up any futile quest for stability, and become a good little manic-conformist corporate warrior.
In Johnson’s worldview it’s the Littlepeople, the ones with the thinking going on, who have all the troubles coping. It’s the mice who instinctually know what to do and set out to do it without all that time-wastin’ cognition. The mice don’t wonder why they’re stuck in a maze; they just seek out their next given-from-on-high cube of cheddar wherever, within the maze’s confines, it may be.
When Johnson asks if you’re a man or a mouse, he hopes you’ll strive to become the latter.
The book’s implied answer to the titular question is that nobody took away any cheese; the maze-runners merely exhausted their allocated supply.
But that answer begs another question, left unasked in Johnson’s tiny book: Who put the cheese, the mice, and the Littlepeople in the maze in the first place?
TOMORROW: A Pokemon guide to the Presidential candidates.
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