M3T Crew

I have chosen to read and review Who Moved My Cheese? written by Spencer Johnson. Since Who Moved My Cheese? differs from other forms of management literature in ways that will be mentioned, I will emphasize the characteristics of this kind of management literature. The text will focus on if the contents of the book can be implemented successfully in a company.

Who Moved My Cheese? is a book about change. One of Google’s motto is “Change or Die”, strongly indicating that companies reluctant to change gets eliminated. Change is here to stay as an ingredient in our everyday life and is a matter of vital importance to every company today, no matter small or large. Who Moved My Cheese? has been used actively by Apple, Dell, General Motors and IBM to name a few companies.

Who Moved My Cheese? is different from most other management bestsellers, since it’s written as a parable. The definition of a parable is a brief, succinct story illustrating a life or moral lesson. While a fable use animals and forces of nature as characters, parables generally feature human characters. The lesson Johnson wants to teach the reader is the one of how to deal with change. The cheese is a metaphor of what we want out of life. The basic principle is that the individual or the company rushes after the cheese because we believe that it will grant us happiness. Parables seem to divide people into two camps. In one we find avid fans who find parables central to their business library. The other camp derides them as simplistic pulp. Even though they often take only an hour to read, this camp considers them a waste of time. They are insulted to endure tales written for adults at a fifth-grade reading level. I think it’s great that even young people can be able to read and reflect upon the content of the book. Simple doesn’t imply waste.

Who Moved My Cheese? features two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two little people, Hem and Haw, representing humans. The four characters live in a giant maze with long and winding passages, representing the world we live in. The mice have simple brains but good instincts. On the contrary the little persons have complex brains with emotions, thoughts and analyzing minds. Sniff has the ability to use his sense of smell to track down changes, while Scurry acts fast on and instinct, without further analyzing. Hem is learning to adapt to changes when he sees the positive outcomes of them, in contrast to Haw who denies and persists every act of change, fearing it will lead to something worse. The four creatures live comfortably in a section of the maze called Cheese Station C. One day the cheese runs out. What’s interesting is how this new circumstance leads to different course of events for our characters in search for “New Cheese”. This could represent a new innovation making a company’s business idea useless, and how different personalities would tackle this problem.

Social psychologist Kurt Lewin developed The Force Field Analysis Model, describing how the change process works. Despite being developed more than 50 years ago, I think it captures what change is all about even today. Two forces work against each other in the model. Driving forces such as globalization and external environment push organizations toward a new state of affairs, while restraining forces want to maintain the status quo. Restraining forces are resistance to change and are employee behavior related, such as fear of the unknown and unwillingness to break routines. For a change to occur the driving forces must be stronger than the restraining ones. A book like Who Moved My Cheese? can accomplish this, by making a tool for discussion for leaders and middle managers in the organization. This increases the driving forces in Lewin’s model. Who Moved My Cheese? is by no means a management bible, and isn’t advertised as one either. I think that Johnson main intention is to put the change topic on the agenda and bring it up for discussion. In my experience models that are too complicated and/or time consuming are not preferable to use. The simplicity of the message conveyed in the book is according to me of advantage for company leaders and middle management. Just the fact that the story easily creates a discussion about management may be the match needed to light the fire of a successful change.

In the prologue of the book it’s mentioned that a CEO believed in the book so much that he gave a single copy of the book to every employee in his company. Strongly implicating that this is the right action, the author is doing a huge sidestep early on. This encourages managers to mass distribute copies of the book to employees throughout the organization. I disagree with this. Picture yourself a CEO who falls in love with a parable and orders thousands of copies to inspire the troops. The employees may not always get the same brilliant feeling. Some may even feel insulted at being fed what they consider to be simplistic drivel. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams says that parables rank among the top 10 reader complaints in his e-mail. He declares that “workers feel terribly insulted by parables”. By mass distributing copies of the book throughout the company, some employees will certainly see this as an insult or an attempt to characterize employee dissent to change as taboo. If the management distributes this book to employees during times of structural re-organization or during cost cutting measures, the result will become portraying unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This makes employees very reluctant to change in the future, thus strengthening the restraining forces considerably. This makes it harder to start a change process in the future.

To me it’s essential that the book only is used as a tool for discussion. This is easier in smaller groups. In a large company it’s impossible to discuss a changing process including everybody. Therefore I see no need in mass distribution. Distributing the book to all employees in such companies will create a big pressure on people to accept every change no matter what it is, or be labeled a Haw who denies and resists change. This is important to have in mind when thinking about introducing Who Moved My Cheese? in the company.