I got your cheese right here

THERE ARE TWO kinds of people in this nation: those who know about "Who Moved My Cheese?" and those who don't. The people who know can produce long and sometimes angry monologues about it; the people who don't know are totally bewildered. "This is real?" they ask.

I aim to bridge the gap. "Who Moved My Cheese?" is a 97-page book with large type and big margins. It was written by Spencer Johnson, M.D., in 1998. It costs $19.95 retail, indicating that Dr. Johnson, at least, has some notion as to the location of his cheese.

"Who Moved My Cheese?" is much used in corporate settings. Employees are ordered to read the book, to write reports about the book, to break into groups and discuss the book. The principles of the book are referred to in meetings. It is a huge hit among managers, and a huge pain for employees.

The heart of "Who Moved My Cheese" is a lengthy fable. It concerns four characters, two mice named "Sniff" and "Scurry" and two "littlepeople" named "Hem" and "Haw." These "littlepeople" are just scaled-down humans.

All four of these characters operate in the same maze. They seek cheese. Then someone, some unseen hand, moves the cheese. The mice sniff and scurry, you see, and find where the cheese has gotten to. The littlepeople hem and haw,

and therefore find themselves way behind in the search for the cheese. Slowly,

they learn how to find the cheese.

The author seems to think that "cheese" is a metaphor for "success in business," but the employees forced to read the book know the truth: "Cheese" is a metaphor for "continued employment." Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that a flurry of cheese sessions often precedes layoffs.

So iconic has the book become, employees are judged on how well they handle the cheese seminars.

THERE IS A perfectly good life lesson inside the cheese story: "All life is change." That's four words, and they did not cost you $19.95. The problem with the book lies elsewhere.

Employees are encouraged to emulate the mice and/or learn from the travails of the littlepeople. These are interesting choices of role models -- small and powerless things who forever run around a maze because they need cheese.

"Whining" and "complaining" are not encouraged. They are taken as signs of a lack of spiritual growth. The good mice sniff out the new location of the cheese and scurry toward it; the bad littlepeople ask pointless questions and fail to seek the cheese aggressively.

Neither mice nor littlepeople are encouraged to ask why they are in a maze at all, or to question the task, or to consider that maybe running after cheese is a lame substitute for having a life, in a world with garlic fries and roast duck and peach pies.

AND THE EMPLOYEES get the message. No matter how wrapped up in New Age jargon it is, the message is: Ask only small questions. Accept whatever you are told. If it's cheese day at the office, say "thank you" and give a nice cringing presentation about moving with the times.

And let go of that useless nostalgia for, say, times when everyone was on the medical plan, when the concept of "overtime" was meaningful, when memos made sense, when cowardly consultants were not creeping around figuring out whom to fire, when there was a leader in the company who welcomed challenges, had fun doing the job and did not need a dopey little book, because the job itself had meaning.

Reading "Who Moved My Cheese?" I was reminded of another book about "littlepeople" who were constantly required to survive in a mazelike environment characterized by cruel and arbitrary change, another place where the search for cheese was constant. That book is "The Gulag Archipelago."

Nothing really serious going on, just mice learning how to hack the maze.