Review: Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson

Now, I'm not much in the way of reading "business books" myself, and fortunately for me as an IT professional it's rare that my boss pushes one on me, but a year or so ago everyone in our team was encouraged to read this book, and I had to fly halfway across the country the next day, so I went ahead and read it on the plane.

And I'm glad I did!

Who Moved My Cheese? is a short book, about a couple of mice and a couple of littlepeople who live in a maze. Every day they eat cheese, until one day - the cheese disappears!

It's a fantastic parable about what happens to us when the rewards we expect suddenly dry up, and about how we can go on banging our head against a brick wall, expecting to receive something that simply isn't there any more.

I found the story amusing, thought-provoking and extremely relevant. It's a short read, and a very enjoyable one, and if you're looking for something to read on the train, or on a flight, I'd say go for it.

One quibble: the edition I have, and likely it's the only one available these days, has a boatload of introductions and case studies in which various people bang you over the head with parallels and uses for this book. If you're into that, great, but I'm not, and my advice is: Don't be put off by them. Simply skip straight to the story, read it and go ahead and draw your own conclusions.