Still in the Maze
I read Who Moved My Cheese? about 21 years ago, just before starting my current job. I remembered that it was a business parable about change. I remembered it involved mice. Beyond that, I had to look up the summary.
For those equally hazy on the details: Spencer Johnson’s 1998 book is a short allegory about four characters — two mice named Sniff and Scurry, and two “littlepeople” named Hem and Haw — who live in a maze and depend on a cheese supply that one day runs out. The mice adapt immediately and go find more cheese. Hem refuses to accept the change and stays put, waiting for things to return to normal. Haw eventually overcomes his fear, ventures into the maze, and finds new cheese. The message is about as subtle as the character names.
I know the reputation. When a company hands this book out to employees, it has historically functioned less as inspiration and more as a signal — usually right before something bad happens. The criticism is fair: the book has been used to tell workers that job cuts and restructuring are just “change” they need to get comfortable with, which is a considerable ask from people who just learned their department is being eliminated.
But I’ve been thinking about it again anyway, because the present moment makes the cheese metaphor hard to avoid.
We’re living through what feels like daily disruptions — AI reshaping whole categories of work, industries trying to figure out what they even are anymore, job roles that didn’t exist five years ago becoming essential while others quietly disappear. The uncertainty is real and it isn’t theoretical. It’s showing up in actual conversations about what skills matter, what companies need, what a career path even looks like now.
In that context, the characters land differently than they might have in 1998. Sniff and Scurry — the mice who notice the cheese supply dwindling and adapt without overthinking it — look less like corporate yes-men and more like people who stayed curious and kept moving. Hem, who refuses to acknowledge that anything has changed and waits for the old normal to return, is the cautionary tale. And Haw, the one who sits with his fear for a while but eventually chooses movement over paralysis, is probably the most honest portrait of how most of us actually handle disruption: slowly, reluctantly, and then all at once.
The book isn’t a management manifesto. It’s an allegory, and allegories flatten things. Real change — the kind involving livelihoods and identities — is messier than a maze. But the core question it asks is still worth sitting with: when the thing you depended on is gone, are you looking for new cheese or waiting for the old supply to come back?
Twenty-one years in the same job has taught me that the answer changes depending on the day.