Who Moved My Cheese?

Who Moved My Cheese?
Dr Spencer Johnson

The subtitle ‘An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and In Your Life’ is a little spurious. This is a simple book that will take less than one hour to read from cover to cover. On the basis of a word count, or if you’re looking for a management book with answers, this will score very poorly. However that’s not what the book sets out to do.

It presents a rather whimsical story of life for two mice and two small people in a maze. The maze represents the environment for change with unknown futures and the accompanying fears. The four characters are used to represent different attitudes to change. The mice Sniff and Scurry represent the fairly straight forward reactive approach to change. As mice they’re not credited with great intelligence but when their source of cheese is moved, react by setting off to find new cheese supplies.

The little people, Hem and Haw, are credited with the intelligence of men which in many ways provides a hindrance to their ability to change. When their cheese is moved their ‘intelligent’ response leads to a wide range of reactions including denial, recrimination and resentment which disables their ability to set off to seek new cheese. Gradually Haw comes to terms with the need for change and the contrast with Hem is used to illustrate how fear of change can be disabling and how this fear might be overcome.

This simple story illuminates a range of responses to change and provides four different characters to illustrate these response types. These types are inevitably presented in simple forms and can’t deal with the complexity of real change. That isn’t the purpose of the book and is indeed its strength. The four characters provide a vocabulary that many will find useful in describing their, and their colleagues, reaction to change. The approach taken to make that vocabulary accessible is to make the story simple so that the book can be quickly read and passed on to spread the word. The book is so easy to read that I can imagine it being passed on to a colleague to be read in the next hour and moving through a team in a day, rather than languishing in an in-tray for three months awaiting spare time that will never arrive.

If you approach this as another pebble to be tossed into the pool of your ideas. It’s a small pebble but for many a very useful one. It is very accessible and might provide new thoughts, images and vocabulary with which to describe and most importantly share ideas on change. It doesn’t have the answers but no book ever can. People have the answers and the aim of this book is to encourage them to set off to look for their answers, their new cheese.

The Tipping Point.

The Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell.

This is a fascinating and thought provoking book that looks at how ideas and behaviours reach and pass through a threshold beyond which they spread like wildfire. Malcolm Gladwell draws on a number of examples of this phenomenon such as the transformation in the crime levels in New York, the adoption of the ‘once unfashionable’ Hush Puppy shoe or the dramatic growth in the athletic shoe producer Airwalk to illustrate the crossing of these thresholds or ‘tipping points’ at which dramatic advances are made.

In exploring the mechanisms which account for these tipping points he identifies some of the people involved in creating these transformations. and their characteristics that contribute to the spread of ideas. Three distinct types are described; Connectors who contribute through their ability to maintain effective networks to connect ideas with people; Mavens who are the collectors of knowledge and its analysis as information brokers; Salesmen who provide the link to convince the population of the merits of the idea.

The book includes other examples of each of these contributions to the spreading of ideas and for example has some fascinating insights into the work done in the development of the TV series Sesame Street to ensure the stickiness of the educational ideas aimed at children.

This is an engaging, fascinating and stimulating read that provides a number of insights of value to everyone who shares the objective of making new ideas stick and lead to transformation.

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

Freakonomics
by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

Steven D Levitt is an interesting man. He is a trained and expert economist, who doesn’t really like economics. Someone highly skilled in the use of a suite of tools, but who chooses not to use them in the context or the way in which they are routinely used. He thus deserves the title of maverick as he takes his toolkit of measurement and data analysis and points it, not towards the same questions as his erstwhile colleagues, to be used in the same way to glean the same answers. Instead he focuses his attention wherever his interest takes him.

Mavericks are interesting people, they do the unexpected, and see the unseen, and through this book he illustrates what can be discovered if you truly explore questions rather than being led by the existing answers.

As a maverick he needed the guiding hand of a writer, Stephen J Dubner, to settle the ideas long enough to create a book. Together they have created a stimulating volume which will have you seeing new things in the topics they have covered, which range from how elections are won, how teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, how your estate agent works or doesn’t work for you, to how profitable it is to sell illegal drugs.

Steven delights in taking conventional wisdom, and examining it through his measurement trained thinking. He discovers that much conventional wisdom, is strong on conventional, but weak on wisdom. As you read the pages you’ll discover that money doesn’t win elections, that its far more dangerous to have a swimming pool in the garden than a gun in the house and that the biggest contributor to the reduction in serious crime in the United States were changes to the abortion law.

For example in one chapter the book explores the often considered question of nature v nurture. As parents this is a question that sometimes haunts us. How much of what our children become comes from genetics and how much from the way we raise them? Through analysis of a mound of data, including that of children adopted and raised by non genetic parents they concluded an interesting result. Their conclusion is that what we do has little impact on our children, what we are being is what matters.

This has a very strong resonance with my thinking. To paraphrase; taking your child to the museum has no impact on their development, but being the kind of parent who thinks of taking their child to the museum is all important. The subtlety of this difference, I believe divides those that simply ‘do’ change, from those that become change.

More fundamental than describing new insights, their aim is not to change what you think, but how you think. This is nicely captured in their description in the closing paragraphs of the book.

‘You might become more sceptical of common wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem.; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular…. You will find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising.’

This is an entertaining read which will help you question much conventional wisdom, and perhaps spur you on to take this questioning with you wherever you go. So inspired, who knows what power for change this may give you.

Screw it. Let’s Do it. (Lessons in Life)

Screw it. Let’s Do it. (Lessons in Life)
Richard Branson

Richard Branson is well known not simply for his success in business as head of Virgin, but for the manner in which he has achieved it. In this short book he sets out the key lessons that he has learned and which guide his approach to life and business. He manages to cram a lot of ideas into the nine short chapters, and reveals insights into his childhood, the development of his business and the personal challenges he as undertaken as driver of record breaking power boats or as a pioneering balloon pilot.

The book is full of insights which weave lessons learned in childhood, with their application to his life. The role of luck, serendipity or synchronicity, as well as hard work and following your instinct are all brought to life. When we look at someone like Richard there’s a temptation to think that he had something special, something denied to the rest of us. That’s not how he sees it. A key message is that we can all achieve, as he says, ‘I’m a believer in people, and what they can become.’

It is clear that Richard’s success has more than an element of good fortune to it, but this is not something handed out only to a few. Opportunities are all around us is we are able to become receptive to them, and willing to take the risk of succeeding. Once you do there’s no knowing where it may lead.

This is a great little book packed with good ideas and advice, as well as some glimpses into Richard’s life, including the fear and danger that have been part of some of his more public adventures.

Once bought the format and fun style of this book will encourage you to read it, and its messages will prove worthwhile.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig

This is not an easy review for this is not an easy book. One thing I think I’m sure of is that it’s not about Zen or motorcycle maintenance.

On the surface the book is the story of the author and his son with some friends travelling across America. However this provides the environment for the author to share and explore a range of questions and issues including rationality, attitudes to technology, philosophies of life and the meaning of quality. What the book does is create the opportunity and invite the reader to explore these questions and others that they are stimulated to identify themselves. It’s a book that provokes and requires the reader to think. In a sense the book becomes and is what the reader makes of it.

What I made of it, and what makes the book exciting for me, is this approach through the vehicle of a novel of creating an environment in which the reader is teased into thinking through a range of extremely challenging philosophical questions. Many readers unwilling to engage in this process may see little in this book of value viewing it as being over complex and lacking in immediate gratification of a standard novel. Others looking not for questions but answers will be disappointed that the book has not the rigour they are looking for and provides no solutions.

However for those who want their thinking stimulated and their understanding challenged this is a demanding but very rewarding read that will probable warrant being reread several times.

I realise that the above says little about what the book is. I take comfort by quoting a passage from the book that I think releases me from having to describe what it is and invite you to find out what it becomes for you.

“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

All I can say is that whilst this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s the kind of book that just might change the way you see yourself, your world and your future. If you decide to read the book I recommend the 25^th anniversary edition as this has some additional explanatory information by the author and also an interesting exchange of correspondence between the author and publisher which gives an insight into the creative process.