The Cheesy Industry

By Walter Kirn

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.

Though Dr. Johnson is well aware of the hostility that the book provokes in certain readers, he ascribes such negativity to a fundamental aesthetic prejudice. "Many people haven't discovered the simple," says Johnson, 61. "Many people distrust the simple." He recounts the story of his own life--an inspiring case study in following the cheese. Trained as a medical doctor at Britain's Royal College of Surgeons, he set out in his 20s to discover the underlying reasons for illness. His findings? Bad attitudes as much as bad germs. He deemed the pen a better healing instrument than the scalpel.

And given the complexity of today's corporate environment, Johnson's audience is in need of healing. Says management consultant Bill Dunk: "The increasing raft of books in the pop-psychology area attests to how extraordinarily stressful business has become in the Internet age." One of the basic tenets of Cheese is that people think too much, unlike their rodent cousins, who act instinctively, without resentment. While Hem and Haw rationalize their loss of cheese, the mice go in search of new cheese, sending out resumes, so to speak, the moment they get their pink slips.

Ten years from now, and probably sooner, few will remember the lesson of Johnson's brief tale, but our sense of its cultural moment will persist. A time of exhilaration and confusion, when scurrying professionals with Palm Pilots checked their portfolios from speeding cabs. When 24-year-old bosses in baggy khakis told 50-year-olds in pressed suits to take a hike. The cheese will be somewhere else in 10 years, but its faintly moldy odor will linger on.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York