1655 A Mighty Need.
Who Moved My Cheese is one of many books written in the early 2000s in a desperate bid to appeal to the new breed of management coming in to all manner of service industries. I have come to see books of its ilk as toxic to the mindset of the people who read them. I’m not exactly sure how this happens, because the books are relatively benign, and yet the kind of people they target always seem to come away broken and harder to deal with. I worked at a place that required us to read some of these books and then they tested us on them like school children. It taught me to be wary when a manager mentioned roleplaying, because roleplaying to them was very different than what I associated the word with.
This is as close as I’m getting to a valentine’s drawing. I’ve always hesitated with this kind of thing and, of course, the first time I go ahead and give in it gets plastered on a public website thus deincentivizing me for any future images of the same type. Seeing as it’s already out there I decided to show it off to everyone. So there you go.
I just saw a video of new lego minecraft sets. I’m really excited about them because they’re doing more biomes, like mushroom. Kind of wish they’d do some army builder sets though. Getting a single villager, or whatever is kind of annoying after you end up with 5 or six steves…
19 Comments
I read that book. Not condescending at all………………………………. >_o
Ha. Who Moved My Cheese. I remember that, vaguely. Our boss (our principal, actually; I’m a teacher) had us read it years ago. It WAS bullshit, as I recall…
I got to see the movie in the Navy, as they were moving us from “readiness at any cost” (which in wartime was downright essential) to “cost wise readiness.” They were also trying to utilize the Lean 6 Sigma and 5S strategies to save time.
Let me guess – Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense?
Six Sigma is actually a good thing – it is essential to good logistics – BUT it requires intelligence from the management level and more times than not that is sorely lacking. – yeah, I am a CQT CQE CQA
I have learned that six sigma and military don’t mesh well together.
I had very little exposure to the bad kind of roleplaying (one group I was in declined unanimously to roleplay the given topic and just talked about it) but learned to fear brainstorming sessions, to be invited to just come up with crazy ideas, no filtering, only for all such ideas to then be immediately set in concrete and treated as if they were all of vital importance.
Manager role-playing is more awkward than any form of role-playing including sex roleplay by a long shot. A 3000km orbital lazer shot. And that’s freaking long.
Really interesting timing for me on the Who Moved My Cheese mention: I actually just heard about that book for the first time yesterday from someone who runs their own little business and said that they tried to reread it twice a year or so. I was loosely considering taking a look at it, though I’m usually pretty skeptical of anything that resembles a self help book, but between that, the less-impressive-than-he-made-it-sound ratings and the “toxic to the mindset” review, I think I’ll just be deleting that from my potential to-do list…
In some ways it’s a good read just for research in to how to manipulate management types among other things.
Santayana said “to delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.” There are things that help you do your job that you never want to see the people in charge endorsing.
“Who moved my cheese?” is about the need to deal with uncertainty. Maybe it would help someone who needs to learn that, although I think most people figure it out just fine. But it’s also part of management’s job to make sure their employees aren’t crushed by uncertainty as much as possible, so if they’re recommending it to people, it says terrible things about how well they are doing at that.
Those things are the same kind of horseshit as diet and dating books, except that business people are the marks. I worked on a whole clutch of them back around the time that one was published.
YES!
https://youtu.be/iPleY9fh3YE
Finally caught up on archives.
I’m going through rough times right now. Illness in family, job loss, financial problems. Jackie watching you shoulder through adversity over the years has been an inspiration to me to keep going.
I hope things get better for you. Just tread that water till you reach the shore.
Do you like hippie-type songs?
Come all without, come all with need!
You’ve not seen [nothing] like the mighty WEED!
(My apologies to all of those, who aren’t into “the weed”.)
Huh. Yeah. If I’d had known that I was going to leave the last comment, I’d probably have said something else. Oh well.
Fun fact: I work at an Amazon warehouse, and since this strip was posted,I have seen several copies of that book get sold… Before that I had never seen it before in my life.
As a long-time bookstore employee, I count ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ as part of the genre of business fables, along the likes of ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ and ‘The Janitor.’ The books themselves might be okay, but the problem seems to be that their readers don’t often seem to realize that you can write fiction to justify anything at all, and that if reality doesn’t match….