In
the Long Run We’re All Dead Mice
(Or, Trivial Trash for the Unenlightened and Unaware)
by
Karen De Coster
by Karen De Coster
When we were
children, we were supposed to be concerned with who cut the cheese.
Now, as responsible and intelligent and informed adults with big,
fancy degrees who make important decisions concerning business,
we are supposed to mull over the thought of someone moving our
cheese.
 "Moving
your cheese" is, of course, the corporate equivalent of making
change. Sort of like someone moving your post-it pad from the right
side of your desk to the left, over next to the phone. Oh the trauma.
Dr. Spencer
Johnson, the self-proclaimed
"world’s #1 expert on change," made it all happen
with his huge-selling Who
Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work
and in Your Life. Like no other book before it, this
third-rate trash helped to set the standard for the dumbing down
of the populace in the corporate workplace. We all owe much gratitude
to Dr. Johnson, indeed.
 Now,
if by chance you are not used to reading such a challenging book
– complete with Hercules-size type, margins the width of an Arctic
crevice, and, by golly, 6 and 7-letter words – then you may find
yourself more comfortable with Dr.
Johnson’s movie called Who Moved My Cheese? The movie
version of Cheese embodies four main characters that are knock-offs
of television’s Teletubbies.
Only instead of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po, we have troupers
of a much higher caliber: Sniff, Scurry, Hem, and Haw. Teletubbies,
by the way, is geared toward two-year-olds. Who Moved My Cheese,
not holding anything back in its quest for intellectual prowess,
reaches for the apex and manages to boost the reader up to the level
of perhaps eleven years old. An accomplishment of epic proportions.
The precept
of the Cheese story is that we all loathe change, are unquestionably
terrified by it, and like little children who find out they have
arranged seating in the 1st grade, we delude ourselves
and hope it will go away. In fact, we spend all our time
wishing it away. We even have a razor blade to our wrist
just thinking about the fact that we now have to include a bolded
subject line for inter-office memos.
Jon Carroll
recently
published a brilliant takedown of Cheese in the San Franciso
Chronicle, wherein he noted that
"Who Moved
My Cheese?" is much used in corporate settings. Employees are
ordered to read the book, to write reports about the book, to
break into groups and discuss the book. The principles of the
book are referred to in meetings. It is a huge hit among managers,
and a huge pain for employees.
The heart
of "Who Moved My Cheese" is a lengthy fable. It concerns four
characters, two mice named "Sniff" and "Scurry" and two "littlepeople"
named "Hem" and "Haw." These "littlepeople" are just scaled-down
humans.
All four
of these characters operate in the same maze. They seek cheese.
Then someone, some unseen hand, moves the cheese. The mice sniff
and scurry, you see, and find where the cheese has gotten to.
The littlepeople hem and haw, and therefore find themselves way
behind in the search for the cheese. Slowly, they learn how to
find the cheese.
The author
seems to think that "cheese" is a metaphor for "success in business,"
but the employees forced to read the book know the truth: "Cheese"
is a metaphor for "continued employment." Indeed, anecdotal evidence
suggests that a flurry of cheese sessions often precedes layoffs.
So iconic
has the book become, employees are judged on how well they handle
the cheese seminars.
…Employees
are encouraged to emulate the mice and/or learn from the travails
of the littlepeople. These are interesting choices of role models
– small and powerless things who forever run around a maze because
they need cheese.
"Whining"
and "complaining" are not encouraged. They are taken as signs
of a lack of spiritual growth. The good mice sniff out the new
location of the cheese and scurry toward it; the bad littlepeople
ask pointless questions and fail to seek the cheese aggressively.
Neither mice
nor littlepeople are encouraged to ask why they are in a maze
at all, or to question the task, or to consider that maybe running
after cheese is a lame substitute for having a life, in a world
with garlic fries and roast duck and peach pies.
AND THE EMPLOYEES
get the message. No matter how wrapped up in New Age jargon it
is, the message is: Ask only small questions. Accept whatever
you are told. If it's cheese day at the office, say "thank you"
and give a nice cringing presentation about moving with the times.
Carroll’s bull’s-eye
review closes with a bang:
Reading "Who
Moved My Cheese?" I was reminded of another book about "littlepeople"
who were constantly required to survive in a mazelike environment
characterized by cruel and arbitrary change, another place where
the search for cheese was constant. That book is "The Gulag Archipelago."
Cheese
is a favorite corporate mistress for a host of reasons. First of
all, individuality is not welcome in the workplace. In fact, it
is condemned. Critical thinking is a danger to the collective, good-little-team-player
environment. Secondly, the Human Resources (HR) people that push
this book are not typically of the intellectually rigorous variety,
and their four years of self-help philosophizing and superficial
cheerleading – masquerading as a college degree – puts them on par
with little mice and Teletubbies. Hence the pushdown of outright
mental incapacity to other people who are responsible and intelligent
and informed adults with big, fancy degrees who make important decisions
concerning business, but are forced to read a book about a bunch
of little mice that chase little pieces of cheese around a maze
because they are too helpless to do anything else worthwhile. The
HR folk are better off sticking to sexual harassment seminars and
arranging charity walk-a-thons, as opposed to engaging discerning
businesspeople in endeavors that are well over their head.
Lastly, it
is sad to say that a whole lot of corporate drones do eat this book
up – pun intended – and literally gush over it, and can’t wait to
turn in their little book reports about how Cheese made them
whole again, and changed their lives immensely. If you are one of
those disobliging employees who doesn’t think that, you had
better not say it, because you will be tossed out of the maze and
hogtied to the kitchen table leg until the cat comes and gets you
for dinner.
The story,
as a whole, is a pile of collectivist, feel-good, moronic debris.
Its purpose is to dumb down every corporate worker bee to the lowest
common denominator. Reading the book voluntarily is insulting to
the core. Being told to read it is to be engaged in pure politics
for the sake of fulfilling some controlling manager’s fantasies
in the workplace. Cheese essentially tells you that you cannot
stand out from others, that you must accept your bits of cheese,
and smile, for it pays your mortgage and new car lease every month.
As Laura
Lemay puts it, Who Moved My Cheese is "a 94 page,
$19.95 version of the bumper sticker that says "Sh** Happens." And
so it is. But we already knew that.
March
11, 2006
 Karen
De Coster, CPA, [send
her mail] is a part-time freelance writer; graduate student
in Economics and Finance; and a full-time, accounting and finance
professional. She is fond of motorcycles, guns, Delirium
Tremens, lake perch, Stillwater (Minnesota), deadlifting, old
barns, road trips through the Ohio Valley, magazine racks, general
stores, cigars, iTunes, martini bars, and articles defending Martha
Stewart. She enjoys pissing off the extroverts by listening to her
iPod in public. Check out her
website, along with her
blog.
Copyright
© 2006 Karen De Coster
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