Who Moved My Cheese?

This is the shortest business book that I have ever read - only 90 odd pages of large text in all and a mere 50 pages of large text for the central story. But the subject matter is huge - how does one deal with change?

American writer Spencer Johnson is the author of the best-selling "One Minute" series of business books. Here he tells the simple story of four little characters who live in maze. Two of them are mice called Sniff and Scurry and two of them are littlepeople named Hem and Haw. All of them are looking for cheese.

The mice can only use simple but inefficient methods of trial and error, but the littlepeople have the ability to think and learn from experience. In their different ways, they all discover a plentiful supply of cheese at Cheese Station C.

But one day there is no cheese and each of the four have to cope with this profound change. The two mice react instinctively without thinking too much and immediately look for new cheese but with the same simple trial and error techniques. However, the two littlepeople give the matter a lot of thought and go through a range of emotions from anger to frustration to denial.

Hem is afraid to let go of what he knows and risk exploring new parts of the maze, but Haw eventually takes control of his predicament, visualises the cheese ahead, and goes searching for new cheese in spite of his fears. As his journey progresses, he realises that he should have anticipated the change and been ready to act quicker.

This incredibly simple but effective tale is a metaphor for us all. The cheese represents whatever we want in our working or personal life, while the maze is the organisation or relationship in which we operate. So many people find change very difficult even to talk about, let alone to act upon rationally, that this book can serve a valuable purpose in providing a vocabulary for discussion and hopefully an incentive to action.