
Issue No 102		13 July 2001

LaborNET	Ask Neale	Tool of the Week

Review

Cheesy Management

Currently climbing Australian best-seller lists is the 'life-changing' motivational book 'Who Moved My Cheese?' Rowan Cahill has a nibble but doesn't like the taste.

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The 94-page large print book with cartoon illustrations is part of the highly profitable American secret-of-life literary genre that includes Dale Carnegie's 'How To Win Friends And Influence People' (1936) and Richard Bach's 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' (1970). It is a genre associated with transient, cultish, books and simplistic messages.

Author Spencer Johnson is an American psychologist, doctor and medical consultant, turned Harvard Business School management guru. 'Who Moved My Cheese?' was published in 1998; by April 2000 it was topping American best-seller lists with more than a million sales.

The success of the book owes much to savvy marketing. Johnson knows how to make a buck, having authored eight other multi-million selling self-help books. An industry was built around the Cheese book, including coffee mugs, pens, a training kit retailing at $US995, and pitched at the corporate world.

Corporations embraced the book. The Bank of Hawaii, for example, distributed 4000 copies to staff members. Locally the American boss of BHP, Paul Anderson, has handed 30 copies to his senior managers, told them to read it three times and then take the message to all BHP workers. It is understood Mobil management is also using the book.

AMWU assistant national secretary Dave Oliver recently blew the whistle on Australian corporate interest in the Cheese book. According to him the book is "patronising and insulting (American) psychobabble".

'Who Moved My Cheese?' is a parable about change. The story takes place in a maze and involves a hunk of life-sustaining cheese, two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two mouse-sized 'littlepeople' named Hem and Haw.

When the cheese is inexplicably relocated in the maze, the characters have to find it or perish. Those able to accept the challenge, prosper. Change is not to be feared. Change should be embraced. Hemmed in by fear and tradition, however, poor bastard Hem is left behind. Stiff shit loser, as Tony Abbott might say.

Corporations love the book because of its kindergarten-style imagery and simplistic message. Corporations want employees to accept change, because change is on the corporate agenda. In the free-market world, corporate change all too often involves downsizing, retrenchment, asset-selling, outsourcing, individual contracts, increased workloads, job insecurity, even loss of entitlements. For many corporate bottom-liners the ideal workforce is a compliant workforce.

But life is not a maze, cheese does not unaccountably move, and human beings are not on a par with mice. Change occurs because people make it happen. Currently corporations, and unelected international bodies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation that represent business, call many of the shots on the world stage. But this does not have to be; it is not inevitable.

In reality Hem and Haw are trapped in a maze because their creator did not endow them with the ability to think and act collectively, to question and challenge, to organise and contest. To have done so would have been to tell another story, one not associated with blinkering workers and adding to corporate bottom lines.

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Issue 102 contents

Interview: Jolly Green Giant
Senator Bob Brown on the upcoming federal poll, balances of power and what the Greens can teach the trade union movement.

Workplace: Call Centre Takeover
Theresa Davison brings us this real-life story from the coal face of the call centre industry.

E-Change: 1.2 Community � The Ultimate Network
Peter Lewis and Michael Gadiel look at the potential for network technologies to reconnect communities.

International: Child's Play
Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA has recently entered a new alliance with the Child Labour Schools Company to support a project for child labourers in India.

History: Flowers to the Rebels Faded
With the departure of our own Wobbly, a look at the development of the Wobblies in Australia and their view of Labor politicians and the work ethic seems timely.

East Timor: A Dirty Little War
In this extract from his new book, John Martinkus recounts the scenes in Dili immediately following the independence ballot.

Satire: Telstra Share Failure Ends City-Bush Divide: Everybody Screwed Equally
Communications Minister Richard Alston today claimed that the government had fulfilled its promise to ensure that the bush was not disproportionately disadvantaged by Telstra's privatisation.

Review: Cheesy Management
Currently climbing Australian best-seller lists is the 'life-changing' motivational book 'Who Moved My Cheese?' Rowan Cahill has a nibble but doesn't like the taste.

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