[tracyrtwyman]

On the subject, here's the book I would least recommend to anyone. Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, by Spencer Johnson. My grandfather gave me a copy of this book when I was having trouble with my career. It was horrible. Here's the review I wrote of it for amazon in 2005:

Are you a man or a mouse?, November 19, 2005

The message of this book is meant to squelch personal ambition and encourage its readers to resign themselves to corporate slavery. The central metaphor that the author uses is inherently dehumanizing. In his world-view, all of the people who work beneath the summit of the corporate pyramid structure are akin to mere lab mice, trapped inside an inescapable maze not of their own making. They are being cruelly manipulated by their all-powerful corporate overlords, represented by the scientists running the experiment, who keep moving the metaphorical cheese (representing sources of income in the workplace/marketplace) to new locations. The mice must constantly adapt to the ever-changing cheese movement patterns devised by their overlords, or else they will starve. In this scenario, the only power the mice have is over their own basic survival. If they persistently, tirelessly pursue the cheese hunt, constantly adapting their strategies to the new conditions, they can live to hunt another day. The changing cheese locations may represent for the readers, variously: (a) changing market forces, such as new trends in consumer demands, or; (b) changes in the demands of their employers (such as requiring more previous experience for applicants, longer hours, smaller pay, fewer benefits, drug tests, intrusive personality assessments, credit checks, etc.)The key to being able to adapt to these changes is to maintain a positive attitude about it, and to accept the changes without complaint.

Basically, I object to the idea that I have no control over where I find my cheese (that is, where I get my income). It is true that forces outside of ourselves and beyond our control have a great impact upon market forces and business trends. But a lot of those business trends are also created by people - individual people with new ideas that spark new business trends. These people are responsible for moving the cheese - people that the author has blanketly dismissed as powerless, insignificant vermin.

I would think that if you were going to use mice and cheese as a business metaphor, the cheese would represent sellable products and services, while the mice would be the potential customers or clients. In this way of viewing it, businesses keep changing the way they present their cheese to make the bait more alluring to the mice. If you are successful, the mouse gets trapped, and you've won a new customer. But such a metaphor again seems insulting to the class of people represented as mice (the gullible public), so it's not an appropriate allegory to use. I don't think the allegory of "Who Moved My Cheese?" is any more appropriate.

I think we can all get what author Spencer Johnson was trying to say. But perhaps a less condescending image would be of a Nomadic tribe of Native Americans who must keep moving to new hunting grounds, or of a fisherman moving to new waters where the fish are more abundant. At least then the seekers of sustenance would be represented as humans with free will, not as pea-brained rodents controlled by someone else they can't even see. If the reader actually took the lessons taught by Spencer Johnson in "Who Moved My Cheese?" to heart, their outlook on their own future would be inherently bleak, hopeless, and Sisyphean. Because he teaches that you can never be the scientist: you are always the mouse, living off of the scraps that fall from those above you.

I think that no one who has any real ambition or personal vision can believe the things in this book and succeed. But I give it two stars, rather than one, because I did find it revealing. I think that the author has subconsciously revealed how he views people. The fact that this has been such a widely used corporate training tool reveals how many executives view their employees. But they only get away with treating people like lab mice because people are all too willing to let someone else control them. They do this because they have been made to believe that they are already powerless, just like this book says you are.

If anyone else has thoughts on this book, please let me know.