The Cheesy Industry

It seems to be the fate of certain best sellers--the ones that propose to reveal the secrets of life in seven easy steps--to live on not for the lessons they impart but as poignant reminders of a cultural period. How to Win Friends & Influence People evokes a time of polyester salesmen tooling through leafy suburbs in aqua Buicks, hawking insurance policies and vacuum cleaners. Jonathan Livingston Seagull takes us back to an era when vegetarians in Earth Shoes tramped the countryside stalking the wild asparagus. Easy to read and easier to forget, they are books we look back on shaking our heads in amusement and disbelief. Were we ever really that small, that innocent?

Indeed, we were, and we continue to be. Consider this year's ubiquitous insta-scripture, Who Moved My Cheese?, a 94-page handbook on success that currently tops three major best-seller lists--those of the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and USA Today. The work of M.D. turned management guru Spencer Johnson, whose One Minute Manager sold more than 7 million copies, the book has become the literary pet rock of the new economy.

Accounting for this phenomenon isn't easy. The book's promised simple but powerful message turns out to be the same simple but powerful message shared by every best seller of its category: Change isn't everything; it's the only thing. Embrace change; don't fight it. What's different about the book, and what explains its vast appeal, perhaps, is its kindergarten imagery. There's cheese, see, which represents what people--in this case characters named Hem and Haw--truly, deeply desire. People get frustrated when the cheese is moved. Instead of standing around and griping, though, people need to get busy finding new cheese, like the mouse characters in the book, Sniff and Scurry. Get it? Of course you do. You already knew it.

Yet by overstating the obvious, Johnson has sold more than a million copies of Cheese at $19.95 each--he keeps half the profits--and the book has ripened into a mini-industry that includes pens, coffee mugs and other trinkets. And there is expensive Cheese for corporations--the Cheese Experience, a half-day learning program for $895, and the Cheese animated movie, at $495.

And why not? To corporate America, discussing the mobility of dairy products sure sounds a lot less threatening than terms such as restructuring, re-engineering and outsourcing. Durk Jager, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, a company in the midst of a huge overhaul, posted a notice on the employee website recommending it. Lew Platt, former head of Hewlett-Packard, endorsed it in a speech. Larry Johnson, CEO of the Bank of Hawaii, handed out 4,000 copies to staff members and asked them to discuss the story with their managers. Says he: "Our objective was to try and condition employees as much as possible for the changes that were under way and the changes that lay ahead." How did the staff react? "Not every person in the organization jumped onto this as something that was valuable." Since the bank's changes included layoffs, this is not surprising.