WIN 5 SBD for the best comment on this post! It has a great message, but the format does not work for everyone! "Who moved my cheese?" was required reading for my coaching training. It was a hard slog... the story is a bit trite and patronizing.
I can understand how people who are about to get laid off, get really pissed off when they are shoved a copy of this in their hands when "change managers" hand it out in a "reorganisation".
People are probably not in the best mental state in that situation to receive the messages of this book.
If you are ready to receive the message, I think the concepts can be profound and are essential to build a succesful life strategy to navigate the IDEA ECONOMY...
A lot of things will change a lot faster than we are used to and you can't assume anymore that if things are OK at the moment, they will stay that way.
So in this post I want to extract those lessons for you
From wikipedia the summary points which I add my comments to:
Change Happens They Keep Moving The Cheese
I think it is crucial to understand that what worked before is not necessarily going to keep working in the near future:
e.g. many people have figured out that "the corporate ladder" has vanished and this is a game not worth playing anymore (in most cases).
A lot of previously "respectable jobs" like doctor, lawyer, university professor etc. turn out to be mere pyramid games where only the top of the heap make a decent living /life and progressively the bottom of that pyramid is under attack.
E.g. a lot of low level lawyer jobs etc. will disappear to AI (you can already contest parking tickets with a chatbot app)
Technological progress is creating abundance which is a double edged sword. Abundance looks great on the surface because expensive things and services get cheaper.
But those making the goods and services are now seeing their income decline or disappear to outsourcing and automatization.
Anticipate Change Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
Once you see in your job the first signs of declining conditions, take into account it is not just a "dip". If you see a boulder rolling down a mountain, it is not suddenly going to go up... (unless something dramatically changes)
If the tendency of the organisation is negative, BAIL OUT! Even if it is a large organisation, unless they are fundamentally changing business models, chances are is that the negative trend is only going to accelerate.
I worked for several airlines, after the first bankruptcy within a year of starting my first real job, I learned some harsh lessons quickly. (For which I am eternally grateful actually)
- our company went bust together with the national airline, which everyone considered "too big to fail". Turns out nothing is too big to fail. If the economics of the business model don't make sense anymore, the company has no reason to exist...
- I saw couples which were earning a lot of money (pilots + stewardess e.g.) go to having to sell the big house and the 2 cars after both of their employers went bust.
*Lesson= live within your means and build a warchest, things can flip quickly no matter how stable your employment seems at the moment. *
Monitor Change Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
This too, I think is very important, especially with the ever shortening life cycles of organisations and technologies.
What worked last year is not necessarily going to keep working.
I think true for SEO, social media, online business etc. even cryptocurrency will keep working until it doesn't.
Don't assume that what worked before will keep working!
Adapt To Change Quickly The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
The most difficult to give up something which seems to be working (still.. more or less). If you are a knowledge economy professional and making decent money, you might not want to change course. Time to take an honest look at your industry and job. How are new entries in your industry doing, you might be slightly higher up the pyramid and not affected yet but what is coming?
If you start see the negative tendency develop you have 3 options Love it, Change it or leave it.
Served me well! If you don't love your circumstances, either try to CHANGE it before it is too late, or BAIL.
Biggest obstacle is your own mind and comfort zone, I have seen many people stay in an ever deteriorating situation (frog in hot water) until it was too late.
Change is scary, and I think this is something that can't be underestimated.
We all have the idea that these are ups and downs and things will get better. In most cases they won't, things are going to change radically and it won't ever get "back to normal" !
From a risk perspective, unless you can personally affect the outcome, I think it is always better to get out of a deteriorating situation (like a company getting in trouble) rather than stick around and let it affect your psychological well being.
This is for me the biggest cost of sticking around, it grinds you down and robs you of your enthusiasm and courage to do stuff.
Yes, short term it can cost money and you shouldn´t get out before knowing how you are going to make up the lost income, but medium to long term most of the outcomes are likely to be bad once the negative trends take hold.
- Things were bad for a while in my airline, some saw it coming and jumped ship. Those that jumped before things went down the tubes did all right mostly.
- In later airlines I learned from that and twice jumped ship once I understood there was no reason to believe that things would improve . The best these organisations were hoping for was break even. My friends and colleagues who stayed, are still working there but suffered years (over a decade) of ever worsening conditions, flat salaries and dodging the next round of layoffs.
At the time it did not seem smart to leave a well-paying job, but I was calculating differently after that first bankruptcy.
I realised that the mental energy you lose worrying about your job is worth more than your salary. (It still took me 6 months of
worrying and it really changed my personality to a pessimist before I realised I had to get out of that situation.)
The mental freedom you get from moving to a better situation where you don't have to worry constantly, to me is priceless and the ultimate luxury.
I also realised, the reason most people stayed was because they could not afford to leave their jobs, they were in a golden cage. In one airline, my colleagues were making a lot of money (unrealistic salaries, double industry average for the same job) but spent it all on big houses, cars and expensive schools for the kids. They could not afford to leave. I saw this with many friends who moved to work in Dubai too for instance.
Life lesson: avoid entangling yourself in spending habits which don't allow you to change to different situations quickly.
Change Move With The Cheese
Taking that first concrete step to change is scary!
You give up certainty for total uncertainty, even if your circumstances are bad you know what you have.
You have to start small, kind of inoculating you to this fear and move despite of it. We all have our comfort zone, it starts of as a small bubble within which you feel confident. I see it as a muscle, you need to constantly expand by exceeding your current limits just a bit, but often. So after a while your comfort zone becomes a useful size so you get comfortable with taking on new challenges.
Don't try to conquer the world with your first experiment, chances are it goes horribly wrong.
The utility of going outside of your comfort zone is how to deal constructively with situations that don't work out as predicted. After a while you stop seeing that as failure, you start to "roll with the punches" and just learn how to make the best of it.
The timing of making your move is more art than science. I think most people wait a bit too long. But that's all right, better to jump than be pushed.
One caveat : jumping constantly from one thing to another constantly is not adapting to change, that is more likely lack of focus and distraction.
If you have to constantly jump quickly again after you moved, maybe your decision making process was not great in the first place. The idea is to make considered jumps, not jump into the dark and hope for the best!
After you jump, expect things to work differently than you expected, that is normal, you need to develop the skill of making the best out of unexpected situations.
Enjoy Change! Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
This message can come across as especially cruel to someone who is forced to change, for them change is definitely not perceived as an adventure.
I think the trick is initiative; physiologically, change that you initiate generates a different (more positive) kind of stress than change that you are subjected to.
In other words, it is better to jump than be pushed off the ship :) but few people have the courage to jump.
I think it is helpful if you have built up the skill to change previously, once you have gone through it and saw that what is on the other side is not all that scary it becomes progressively easier until the point where it becomes addictive.
At that point you have developed the coping skills to deal with setbacks as a matter of course and make the best out of it. That can also be very satisfying, because after overcoming adversity comes a genuine, earned, sense of achievement.
Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again They Keep Moving The Cheese.
Unfortunately, in a complex world, things keep moving. So you need to get in a habit to move with that world too.
It will be a life of constantly climbing hills.
After conquering one hilltop, you find if you stick around too long it will start to sink.
So the difficult thing is to give up your status as an "expert" and start all over again at something else to become a newbie again.
That might sound exhausting but imagine the excitement and satisfaction you had when finding something new and the challenge of learning and mastering it... if you reach that mental space you can really enjoy constant adaptation and change.