This Consultant's Whey Is Cheese-y

Nothing escapes the cheddar-sharp eye of the Consultant Debunking Unit (CDU) -- absolutely nothing. So when a book by a consultant hit number one on USA Today's best-seller list -- and Business Week's best-seller list, and the New York Times business best-seller list, and Publisher Weekly's best-seller list, and the Wall Street Journal's best-seller list -- the CDU began to sniff something, well, cheesy in the air.

Nor did the CDU fail to notice the fact that Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life (Putnam, 1998), by consultant Spencer Johnson, has been scarfed up by the corporate world faster than Brie from a buffet. The president of the New York Stock Exchange read the book and recommended it to his entire staff. Southwest Airlines purchased 27,000 copies for all of its employees and sent a copy to every person's home. Mercedes-Benz ordered more than 7,000 copies and uses the book in its training program.

The book has its own Web site, an animated movie, a learning program called "The Cheese Experience" for organizations, a "Cheese E-Shop" (get yer squeezable, cheese-wedge stress relievers here), and an all-around merchandising machine that plasters images of mice and cheese on everything from coffee mugs and screen savers to Post-it notes and golf shirts. Mice? Cheese? Coffee mugs? Golf shirts, for Gouda's sake? A cheese experience indeed!

The book, a lightweight, 94-page hardcover, kicks off with a shameless prefatory plug by the author's business partner. The story goes like this: Four little characters -- two humans and two mice -- live in a maze. One day, they all find cheese in a corner of the maze. Day after day, they go back to the same spot and eat cheese. Finally, when they run out of cheese, the two humans hem and haw (which, as it happens, are their names -- Hem and Haw) and grumble and whine (not their names, but you get the idea). Meanwhile, the two mice go scurrying off into the maze and, as a result, find more cheese.

From this, we are to conclude the following: It's better to scurry than to wallow, and it's much better to emulate mice than to emulate humans. The book ends with an exhortation to spread the story around, an order form entitled "Share It With Others," and a reminder that Who Moved My Cheese? is "available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases."

The CDU smelled a rat. Sure, parables can be instructive. Sure, it's hard for people to change. But mice in a maze? Are we mere rodents in someone else's Kafkaesque construction, our Klosterkäse delivered from some unknown place on high? Are we mice, then? Or are we people? And if we're people, would we really be better off acting like mice, as the book suggests?

To find out about mice and mazes, the CDU went straight to its bookshelf and grabbed a well-thumbed copy of Current Protocols in Neuroscience. Most rodents, says the chapter on mice and mazes, "are quite fearful of exploring the arms during the initial training periods. [The rodent] will usually remain frozen in one place on the maze and not explore. In addition, if it is frightened it will usually defecate and urinate on the maze and squeal when being picked up."

To the CDU, it sounded as if rodents are at least as nervous about change as humans are, particularly when it comes to mazes. To continue its research, the CDU paid a visit to the man who wrote the book (actually, a section of the book): Gary L. Wenk, professor of pyschology and neurology at the University of Arizona. What, the CDU asked Wenk, would happen if you put little humans in a maze?

"I imagine they'd wonder what the heck they were doing there, and then they'd find a way to climb out," Wenk replied scientifically. "Isn't that what's so special about humans -- that our brains enable us to solve problems outside the context they're embedded in? I'd guess the people in Who Moved My Cheese? suffered some sort of frontal-lobe damage."

Although Wenk's answer made sense, the CDU wanted more hard data. Which is what Dalhousie University psychology professor Richard Brown offered. Brown happens to be an authority on how people deal with change inside mazes. For a paper currently under consideration at a peer-reviewed journal, Brown put 20 males and 20 females through a joystick-driven virtual maze in his lab in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Then he rerouted the maze, changing the path to the goal box.

He actually did move the cheese!

What happened then? Did pandemonium reign? "The subjects behaved just like mice do," said Dr. Brown, directly contradicting the most fundamental premise of Who Moved My Cheese? "The humans showed the same pattern of learning that the mice did. According to my data, they paused briefly and looked around. Then they moved in a new direction." No yelling? No fussing? No "Gimme my Hipi Iti"? No "I wanta ricotta salata"? "Not to my knowledge," Brown replied, consulting some printouts. "No freak-outs that I heard of. Mostly, they finished the maze, and that was that."