With unemployment as high as it is the message of Who moved my Cheese, is highly relevant. When someone loses a job depression can result. Depression tends to make people passive and to feel hopeless. This can be a dangerous spiral of passivity leading to more hopelessness leading to more passivity. Breaking this cycle is good for mental health and giving people the courage to change is how unemployment goes down as dying industries shed workers and growing industries gain workers. Whether the reason for unemployment is cyclical or structural unemployment is a huge amount of change in a short time. Those who deal with it the best will be the ones who deal best with change.
In the United States people complain about the power of the government while ignoring that of the business community. For most Americans their immediate supervisor has more power than every elected official in the country. Unfortunately, in the corporate establishment many people achieve power who for psychological reasons should not have it. Perhaps they have difficulty making friends, and expect their subordinates to provide for them the social satisfactions they cannot earn by their personalities and characters. Some of them are simply bullies.
They get their positions either because they were good at something irrelevant to management, or because they are skilled sycophants.
Not only that, but the Cheese is a lie.
Sage advice, which would probably be better received were it not being delivered by the engineers of that adversity.
I personally prefer the book’s lesser-known competitors, Hey, I Didn’t Order a Shit Sandwich! and Fire, Shmire-- What, We’re Gonna Leave the Factory Doors Unlocked?
But there’s only so much extra effort one can put in before it becomes counterproductive. And there are only so many nostrums that management can apply before the employees get sick of it and tune out.
Let’s start with the fact that, while some change is inevitable because the industry is changing, some of it happens because management has discovered some new! improved! spiffy! management method that is supposed to fix all of the company’s problems, including problems that may not exist.
In addition, a lot of managers just like to throw their weight around. When they say, “Change is inevitable,” they mean, “Do it my way or quit before I fire you. I have a stack of resumes for your job that weighs more than you do.”
Never change, VT.
You have to realise that most of the “new” initiatives are nothing of the sort.
They are standard tools, techniques and concepts that are given spiffy new name, wrapped in a methodology and sold by the consultants for a reassuringly high price.
Thing is, in any halfway normal organisation the managers have all the resources that they need, they have all the brains and ability just waiting to be wound up and let go. But it is easier for them to farm out the responsibility (and the risk of failure) to the consultants. they’d rather pay millions to them than spend a few hundred grand on training, enabling and backfilling the people they have.
And when it fails (which happens most of the time) you will search for the next fashionable set of tools. And guess what happens to fashions people?
So people get initiative fatigue. They stop listening, they stop caring, they stop trusting the managers to do the right things and to demand the right things from their employees.
You cannot “buy” a culture. It is an emergent property of all organisation elements. You might not be able to direct it perfectly (which is what the consultants try to sell you) but there are certainly factors which help push it in the right direction. One is trusting the ability of your employees, the other is having management who are willing to pay more than lip service to the changes they want to see.
Why yes, I do act as an internal consultant, why do you ask?
The book takes a simple message that could be communicated in one chapter and stretches it out to 100 pages. That said, it has a good point.
I worked for a software company in the 90’s and into the 2000’s. We had a pretty sweet life, selling our software to schools, going in and shooting the shit with the end user, getting minimal ammounts of administrative approval, and getting it installed. Just after 2000, the business began to change from a technology perspective. Isolated client-server apps were being phased out in favor of centralized, web-based apps. We came out with a new software package to address this change. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision by some manager, this was something the marketplace was demanding.
We went from selling a small a small app to an individual school for under 10 grand to selling to an entire district for up to a million bucks for the largest districts. From selling to the end user to selling to the CIO and the dollar ammounts required superintendant approval and school board sign off. Things were completely different. We went through the “Cheese” training, and while I thought it was kinda stupid, you could see certain people and certain attitudes in the book.
In the end, about 30% of the salespeople couldn’t make the adjustment. Some tried and failed, but most who didn’t make it didn’t even try to change. The old strategies just didn’t work with the new products, but they said “this is what worked in the past, so I’m going to keep doing it.”
Hilarious review of “Who Moved My Cheese”:
http://dontstepinthepoop.com/review-who-moved-my-cheese
I especially liked this part:
I don’t think that the book is necessarily irrelevant, but mass-issuing the book to people working in an organization that is undergoing change with the expectation that this will help matters was never particularly relevant or smart. Yet, people did it. Today, I suspect most people are onto it and wouldn’t accept it.
The problem with “Who Moved My Cheese” is that, while it has a nugget of truth to it – there are those people who won’t change, or resist change for the sake of resisting – this is really a symptom of a greater issue. For the most part, people are reasonable. Yes, there are exceptions, but for the most part, people can be made to understand about organizational changes in a frank, direct, and honest manner. Giving them a book about fearing change instead is pretty patronizing.
As an example, I worked for a company once who went through a massive organizational change pretty much every year. Every time, they’d write new mission statements, come up with yearly “themes”, recommend and discuss books, etc. Employees would be forced to go to teleconferenced pep rallies, PowerPoint training seminars, and complete online tests and requirements. The end result? It’d all just change the next year anyway, by the time people were starting to work with it. The problem ultimately was that there was too much change - constant change that produced nothing - and people had learned to fear it. Trying to make small, local change was always met with resistance because upper management had taught employees that change meant a big, fat waste of time and money, and employees were rightfully angry to see the lavish parties for executives through a webcam when they got a single copy of the book-of-the-year raffled off per 1,000 employees. They were angry to see the company spend millions on consultants, trainings, events, and new, ill-used technologies, while at the same time the company was laying off long-term, talented employees and replacing their positions with temps making next to nothing.
How well do you think You Moved My Cheese helped that situation?
Meaningful change has to be a collective process. Not everyone can have a say, of course, but changes to your job that are thought up by someone 3,000 miles away who has never seen your facility and has barely any idea what you do with yourself are unlikely in the extreme to be helpful.
I had a friend whose company was acquired. They distributed this book to everyone in his department as a precursor to more demanding hours and no hope for a raise or bonus.
He quit and eventually did freelancing work for the company making more for 20 hours a week than he got working 50 hours a week before he quit.
The sad part is that half the department stayed and continued to get shat on. the assumption was that if you didn’t leave it was because you COULDN’T leave.
The lesson seems to be “Always be looking for your next job, it will make you more desirable at your current one”
And those are all sensible and reasonable messages with which I take no issue. Of course there are times one gets rebuffed when attempting to improve things, and sometimes that rejection is justified – whether because of cost or company strategy or whatever – and sometimes it perhaps happens for less logical and noble reasons. Sometimes the person who has to OK the improvement is the “other mouse”. (And then you try and work around the problem, fix what you can, and hope that, perhaps in time, the roadblock will become removable).
Somebody needs a hug. 
Seriously though, I’ve had some great managers, and some not so great… and those for a variety of reasons… problems are usually complex and nuanced, and not as simple as “my boss is an idiot”.
One past manager was an exceptional technical team lead who didn’t really want to be a manager but got pressured into it and wasn’t ever happy or comfortable with the position. Another was a line manager who really wanted to be a project manager. Another was a really good manager who because of other managers leaving ended up so overloaded that I got to see him once a fortnight. Another was competent and personable but wouldn’t back up his staff “against” his management peers (even when they were right).
I make no blanket statements about managers. That doesn’t change the fact that a small handful have been – in my 30-odd years of working – incompetent, or complete bastards, or both. (One used to throw… tantrums… at the staff, and was finally fired after doing the same to a client).
Yeah, it was that attitude that got my goat – the stupid Cheese book was really just icing. And not just negativity, suggestions for modifications to the proposed change were met the same way. Grrr… it’s 7-odd years ago and thinking about it can still get me angry.
When facing inevitable change, it is indeed helpful to accept it and embrace it and move forward. There: now you don’t have to read the book.
The problem though is that most corporate change isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of idiotic management trying to fix their screw-ups by “doing something”; usually paying a truckload of $ to a consulting firm that sells them a new org chart.
If your department goes through a lot of reorganizations that means that the people above your department do not like the way it is performing, and the people in charge of the department do not have much of a clue, but they want to look like they are doing something to solve the problems.
In other words, it is a bad sign, and it means that everyone in the department might get fired.
The problem with most of these self-help books is they assume there is always a viable alternative for you.
I have been a dept head, a manager and a line worker and I will tell you I was an excellent manager and dept head. But I sure didn’t start out that way. It took me a long time to get to that point.
I recall how I used to try to motivate and make work, if not a fun place, at least a place that wasn’t awful for my staff.
I recall after being unable to get through to one of my employees Myra. One of my other staff members, Annie said, “Mark I know you mean well and I’d rather have you try too hard than not at all, but it ever occur to you, maybe Myra doesn’t have a lot to be happy about.”
And that really hit home. We’re always told things like, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” That’s fine, if life also gives you sugar and water. But if life only gives you lemons and nothing else, the alternatives aren’t gonna be much use, unless of course you’re suffering from scurvy
Like the Six Sigma example. I am a Six Sigma black belt and it DOES work. But it doesn’t work on every situation. And too many of my fellow Six Sigma belts, would try to apply it to everything. And they fail miserably. Why? Because it only works in a specific circumstance.
Same for the theory with this “Cheese Book” It only works when you have viable alternatives and people not recognizing that alternatives exist.
It doesn’t speak well of my former employer that they deemed this book important enough to call in the regional human resources managers to lead the seminar on it.
It’s my impression (thankfully) that the era of consultancies with Theories of the Week has pretty much passed with the 90s and early 00s. There seems to be less infantilisation of language being used in problem identification and solution. But I still rolleyes when I remember that thing where a manager made you put your watch on the other wrist just to show you that “change felt strange, but it wasn’t a bad thing”.
Inertial resistance to change can exist in management as well. If workers are being asked to do uncomfortable things to which there seem reasoned objections, that is “change resistance”. When managers are being asked to pay more because the market for labour has changed from historical norms, that is just “appropriate fiscal responsibility”. It all depends on who is being asked to bear the cost of change.
I gather that it is the economics of the management consulting life that drove all this. Management types rely on the principle that management is sufficiently a science that no content knowledge of the task being managed is necessary. That immediately creates resentment from those who have been doing a job for decades.
Next, managers tend to move quite quickly from workplace to workplace, even internal managers.
A consequence of this is that they need to do stuff to justify their existence and “brand” themselves as new ideas people. So they adopt one of a small number of standard strategies. Centralise everything that was decentralised. Decentralise everything that was centralised. Rearrange pay structures so that they look encouraging but result in less actual pay. Move on (before the villagers warm up the torches and pitchforks) so they have a shiny new achievement to put on their CV. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Personally, I prefer the sequel: Who Cut the Cheese?
mmm