Some days ago last year, someone posted on Facebook that they were getting their team copies of “Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Work and You’re Life“.
What he may not have known – I’m not sure how this will turn out – is that since it’s publication in late 1998, it had become synonymous with layoffs in corporate America. This is enough so that Wikipedia has some notes on it in the reception portion of the Wikipedia entry on ‘Who Moved My Cheese’:
In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of “structural reorganization“, or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book “the classic of downsizing propaganda” and summarizes its message as “the dangerous human tendencies to ‘overanalyze’ and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.”
‘Who Moved My Cheese‘, Wikipedia, accessed on January 1st, 2023.
It’s not a reflection on the authors. It’s not a reflection of the book itself. I remember when it came out, standing in a bookstore and reading it in it’s entirety in a bookstore rather than buying it because corporate America was going through buyouts, including the company I was working for at the time, and this book was being given rave reviews by everyone in human resources. I’m a fast reader, and it doesn’t take very long to read it.
Upon reading Ehrenreich’s summary in Wikipedia, I tend to agree with her. There is this flare of ‘positivity’ and ‘change your mindset’ that people in authority tend to use whenever they change things with negative connotations for others.
Taken out of that context, it’s not a bad book and probably something everyone in high school should read. It’s written that simply.
I thought that maybe this was all dating me when I read the response to the comment I left on the original post, which pointed out that when a company hands these out, update your resume because things are about to change. It ends up I was wrong.
The book has consistently been used this way, enough so that if you search for “Who Moved My Cheese Layoffs”, you’ll presently find a review by someone named Nancy who thoroughly trashes “Who Moved My Cheese” in 2009 for that reason. The comments on it are sadly entertaining, including someone named Evan stating, “I need to write the sequel: If I’d Known, I Would Have Stolen More Office Supplies.”
Honestly, if your employer distributes this book, you don’t need to ‘sniff the changes in the wind’. They just slapped you and told you changes were coming.
In all of this, I was surprised at the vehemence the original poster had when responding to people saying the same thing I was. It was disturbing, and nowhere did he say that he wasn’t going to be laying people off.
I assumed good and told him in one post that if his intent was not to lay people off, to tell them up front because they could easily get the wrong idea. This resulted in ad hominem attacks, which were a little surprising, and then he went into full Elon Musk mode without being Elon Musk. That’s something I should write about as well at some point, I suppose, this Elon Musk fetish.
Yet it brought to mind many things I have seen management in different companies do over the years. Most of these people live in their own little bubbles, incapable of viewing the world around them, and it’s simple to think of other people as rats looking for cheese. It’s a bit dehumanizing, too, and I have to wonder whether the popularity of the book isn’t linked to the fact that corporate America was mass purchasing it or whether people just liked the book. It draws the whole thing into question, and I would not like to be the author associated with it.
Change is a reality. Most of the time, change is sold and marketed as a good thing. When a company needs to become profitable, one of the first things they do is gut the company’s employees. Sometimes they gut the right ones, sometimes they gut the wrong ones, usually they get a mix of both but to them it’s a matter of the bottom line – about how much money they save. So if you’ve played ‘the game’ well enough that you’re pulling in good money, you’re most likely the one who will get caught in the rat trap.
There is a certain hypocrisy to creating a game in a corporate environment and then getting rid of the winners. I don’t have a real perspective on it because every company will be different, but I do know that I know good people who have gotten the book, who were good at their jobs, and who did in fact move on to do much better elsewhere where management was not obsessed with simple books. In that way, it can be a blessing.
In the end, I am a little disturbed that the book is still used that way. Corporate America, with all that is happening with artificial intelligence, is likely to have ‘corporate restructuring’ (aka ‘layoffs’), and if this book lands on a desk near you, you should have already updated your resume.
In the end, if they don’t want you there, you don’t want to be there. Unfortunately, that means it’s risking your income and copies of the book are not accepted by any bill collectors I know of. Adapt and overcome, and while I do agree it’s insensitive and comes from a place that is dehumanizing by making people metaphors for rats and vice versa, getting wound up in that isn’t going to pay the bills.
Pay the bills. Find somewhere that wants you, and if you don’t find it, maybe you can build it or find people willing to build it with you.
As for the people who work for that person – well, shucks, just read his responses and make up your own damned minds.
Over the last decade, I’ve had to explain way too often the difference between leadership, management, and being a boss. There are people with training that will disagree with some of what I write, if not all of it, but you can notice my level of concern with what they think by the fact that I’m publishing this.