For all its good intentions, Who Moved My Cheese? basically reduces us to mice in a maze sniffing after cheese. Don’t ask why you’re in a maze, don’t ask what makes the cheese move, just keep your head down and find it. And yet, success in areas such as innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, problem solving, and business growth often depends on the ability to challenge assumptions, reshape the environment, and play by a different set of rules (your own!).
Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhorta uses a fable involving a different set of mice in a maze—mice who question everything—to help readers see how they underestimate their ability change the rules, overcome the constraints they face, and control their own destiny. Malhotra encourages readers to audit their assumptions about what limitations they really face and which are self-imposed or unthinkingly accepted. We can create the circumstances and realities we want –we can go beyond simply changing our behavior (find that new cheese!) to changing the game itself. But to do so we need to understand the ways we’re holding ourselves back. As one of the characters in the book says, “the problem is not that the mouse is in the maze, but that the maze is in the mouse.”
