Who Moved My Cheese is the title of a bestselling motivational book that came out a decade ago. Some of you may already be familiar with it, but if not getting hold of it is fairly easy.

It is a story about 2 mice Sniff and Scurry and 2 littlemen who come every day to a cubicle maze. They live on a large supply of cheese in Cubicle C. One day the mice come in and see that the cheese is gone. They quickly leave and succeed in finding more cheese. When the littlemen Hem and Haw come in and see no cheese, unlike the mice their reaction is WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? Hem and Haw rant and rave, they are angry, they blame each other and the world. Eventually one of them, Haw decides to go look for more cheese. At first he finds very little but he keeps looking. After some struggle he finds the Cubicle N that the mice found with many varieties of cheese. He writes a set of rules about change and that is the message of the story:

1. Change Happens
They Keep Moving The Cheese
2. Anticipate Change
Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
3. Monitor Change
Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
4. Adapt To Change Quickly
The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
5. Change
Move With The Cheese
6. Enjoy Change!
Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
7. Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again & Again
They Keep Moving The Cheese.

It is true that we are fearful when things change and often find it hard to accept that things have changed. We may lose hope and blame others and that makes it difficult and more painful for us. At the same time, grief over major life changes is natural and necessary for our growth and regeneration. The sad stuff teaches us a lot about wherein lies real happiness but Who Moved My Cheese skips over all that fuzzy stuff to make its point that opportunism is obedience to the rules of the game.

This message is one the reasons why Who Moved My Cheese was very popular during the huge layoffs in the last decade or so especially among managers in corporations. Cheese rounds always preceded big layoffs. I read somewhere that employees were even rated on their reactions to the story.

Millions of copies were sold as the timing was perfect. It came out at the beginning of outsourcing and the massive shift in the global economy that came after the Internet. It is quite incredible how the economy smoothly shifted millions of jobs abroad without any major outcry--When people passed this book around, often the big hint was hey, you have to move with the cheese. If you are cut up because your job moved to India or China, don’t be foolish, find another job or go there yourself.

If we agree that life is like living in a maze, the purpose is survival, opportunism means happiness, than sure, if my cheese moves I will run after it, no questions asked. In this fable it seems we should be like a herd of mice running after the next piece of cheese—which a bigger power aka corporation creates and puts wherever they choose to. At some point isn’t it wiser to stop and say why am I in this race and what’s important to me?

Several years ago Mr Al Gore the ex US Vice President asked himself this question. Interestingly he had recently failed to become the US President. Today, his documentary The Inconvenient Truth has spawned a sea change in the business climate of USA. Mr Gore wasn’t afraid of looking foolish, he’d take his presentation wherever people would listen at the time when hardly anyone believed in global warming. He was often laughed at. However his persistence ended up creating a climate of global acceptance of global warming.

Merely dealing with change is about being opportunistic and quick to respond like the mice in the fable and solving a short term problem--survival. Conquering change is not about opportunism—running after cheese or what have you but about working towards our vision of the world. It is about having a big heart and a bigger stomach for failure. It is about going inside oneself and asking the hard question why am I here? In the story, the characters skip that important question. In my opinion that question is the only real way to conquer change. Once an answer is found, there is no fear because you will move your own cheese.