Who Moved My Cheese? is a win-win-win little book:

• if you like it, you're cool about change and flexibility at work—good job!
• if you don't like it, you've already gotten the message and you're cool about change and flexibility at work—good job!
• if you're the author, you've designed a book that managers will bulk-purchase and distribute to employees, rather than actually spending time talking with people and addressing their concerns about change and flexibility at work—good job!

Motivational speaker and business consultant Spencer Johnson tells an extended parable involving cheese in a maze and the reactions of different types of individuals when it's not where they expect it to be. The story is plodding, there's no characterization to speak of, the use of language is pedestrian, and in case you don't get the point there's a preface and a postscript to hammer it home.

Change happens and it's smart to anticipate it, adapt to it, and be happy about it. Instead of paying $20 and spending an hour on Who Moved My Cheese? to hear that, it's more fun and arguably more productive to read a good children's book like one of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad collections, or Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, or a few of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit stories. Or in a more philosophical vein, glance over a chapter about mindfulness and stress reduction by Jon Kabat-Zinn, e.g. in his books Wherever You Go, There You Are or Coming to Our Senses. His classic summary of the goal: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." Or even shorter the bumper-sticker mantra: "No attachments!"

^z - 2010-08-16