Be Careful When You Mess With Other People's Cheese

Sorry... Can't resist one more bit of a little rant before I leave for a few days. I tried to be good, but this one was precipitated by a shock.

Almost exactly one year ago, the client my company contracts with had a technical/business problem I was trying to help them solve. The vendor for their middleware product had indicated that they were eventually going to be ending support for the mainframe integration server component of it. The client was faced with the decision of having to continue developing applications on unsupported software, or of having to contract with an unproven third-party who would be a reseller for the integration piece. They wanted to know if our company could help in providing any other alternatives.

I'd always had a good working relationship with our company's technical support staff. On my own initiative, I drove out to upstate New York so that they could tell me about what our company had to offer in this space. One particular guy, a certified Systems Management Integrator, took an entire day out of his busy schedule and gave me a full-day presentation about a product he had written a paper on. The product enables you to leverage existing legacy online systems by aggregating multiple transaction invocations, terminal interactions, and sub-flows, and to deploy them as runtimes. These deployments can in turn be exposed as web services by using a SOAP pipeline. It was a fascinating presentation, and the information I brought back to my managers and to the client was well received.

Just a few days ago, I was talking to another member of that support team on an unrelated matter, and I heard that the person who had given that presentation had taken his own life at the end of July. I was stunned. Recently, my company has gone through another round of layoffs and work consolidations, and due to the increasingly large burden of work being thrown on his shoulders, along with the possibility of being laid off on top of that, it was apparently too much for him. He jumped off of a cliff. Literally.

I couldn't understand it. This was a guy with a lot of smarts who had a lot going for him. In addition to being sharp technically, he had a teacher's natural aptitude. Granted, I didn't know him well, but it did seem to me in retrospect that this fellow might have had a bit of melancholy about him, but nothing I would call severe. I don't think that there are many people who commit suicide over a job alone. There is usually something else going on. From what I heard from my other friend, there may have been some old divorce issues at work here, but most of that was in the past, and the children were all grown and independent. Perhaps in those circumstances, though, the job really does become the raison d'être, and the means of self-definition. Upstate New York isn't exactly chock-a-block full of other things you can do if you lose your high-tech job.

Now, I know that a certain amount of globalization is inevitable and necessary, and I know that individual managers are making decisions that are based on inexorable factors, driven by the marketplace, that are largely outside of their control. They cannot safely resist and deviate. I do believe, however, that globalization as it is currently being practiced and implemented has too much of a "race to the bottom" aspect to it in its relentless quest to slash costs. The human cost, at an individual level like this, and in the cost to society in the depressed and devastated communities that it leaves behind, are being far too much overlooked.

I'm reminded of many of the corporate culture-changing seminars I've seen over the years. Humiliation often precedes the axe. Chances are, if you were asked as an employee to go on some kind of outward-bound trip, or take part in a role-playing game, or asked to hop about on one foot while chanting company slogans, or take part in a 3-legged race for a team-building exercise, you should have taken it as a pretty reliable sign that you were about to get whacked.

The incident about the employee who ended his life put me in mind of a certain chipper mid-level manager a few years back, who has since moved on elsewhere. She didn't like whining of any kind. A few years back, corporate America suffered mightily by being subjected to a certain "motivational" book called Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, by Spencer Johnson. This woman though it should be required reading for everyone.

Apparently, the point of this little book (featuring mice called Sniff and Scurry, and mouse-sized "littlepeople" called Hem and Haw), is that we are all in a maze called life, and when the cheese you are after, be it for sustenance or for self-image, gets moved, you have to adapt to change and find a new way to look for your cheese. In other words - Change happens. Adapt to it or die.

Now, I don't know why it isn't obvious to more people what is wrong with the whole premise. Have corporate employees become such a herd of anesthetized, lobotimized sheep that the "littlepeople" will just let the "bigpeople" steal from them and continue to tell them what is wrong with them? Once again, we see the cost of the collapse of the labor movement, which has been completely defanged and castrated over the past few decades, but still gets blamed for holding back American business. See, we are all just like little rats in a cage, and if your intellectual and social betters decide to move your cheese on you, well, you'd just better get with the program or else.

I can't put it into words any better than San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carrol, who effectively ripped that book in a column called I Got Your Cheese Right Here.

THERE ARE TWO kinds of people in this nation: those who know about "Who Moved My Cheese?" and those who don't. The people who know can produce long and sometimes angry monologues about it; the people who don't know are totally bewildered. "This is real?" they ask...

"Who Moved My Cheese?" is much used in corporate settings. Employees are ordered to read the book, to write reports about the book, to break into groups and discuss the book. The principles of the book are referred to in meetings. It is a huge hit among managers, and a huge pain for employees...

The author seems to think that "cheese" is a metaphor for "success in business," but the employees forced to read the book know the truth: "Cheese" is a metaphor for "continued employment." Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that a flurry of cheese sessions often precedes layoffs.

So iconic has the book become, employees are judged on how well they handle the cheese seminars.

There is a perfectly good life lesson inside the cheese story: "All life is change." That's four words, and they did not cost you $19.95. The problem with the book lies elsewhere.

Employees are encouraged to emulate the mice and/or learn from the travails of the littlepeople. These are interesting choices of role models -- small and powerless things who forever run around a maze because they need cheese.

"Whining" and "complaining" are not encouraged. They are taken as signs of a lack of spiritual growth. The good mice sniff out the new location of the cheese and scurry toward it; the bad littlepeople ask pointless questions and fail to seek the cheese aggressively.

Neither mice nor littlepeople are encouraged to ask why they are in a maze at all, or to question the task, or to consider that maybe running after cheese is a lame substitute for having a life, in a world with garlic fries and roast duck and peach pies.

And the employees get the message. No matter how wrapped up in New Age jargon it is, the message is: Ask only small questions. Accept whatever you are told. If it's cheese day at the office, say "thank you" and give a nice cringing presentation about moving with the times.

And let go of that useless nostalgia for, say, times when everyone was on the medical plan, when the concept of "overtime" was meaningful, when memos made sense, when cowardly consultants were not creeping around figuring out whom to fire, when there was a leader in the company who welcomed challenges, had fun doing the job and did not need a dopey little book, because the job itself had meaning.

Reading "Who Moved My Cheese?" I was reminded of another book about "littlepeople" who were constantly required to survive in a mazelike environment characterized by cruel and arbitrary change, another place where the search for cheese was constant. That book is "The Gulag Archipelago."

Sometimes the only means of defense for those who are powerless in front of larger forces are humor and satire. Here are some satirical books and articles, sure to be more useful and full of wisdom than the silly book itself.

In the Long Run We’re All Dead Mice (Or, Trivial Trash for the Unenlightened and Unaware)

Who Stole My Cheese?!!

Who Cut the Cheese?: A Cutting Edge Way of Surviving Change by Shifting the Blame

Who Cut The Cheese? - An A-Mazing Parody about Change (and How We Can Get Our Hands on Yours)

Who Moved My Soap? : The CEO's Guide to Surviving in Prison