I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze

You are more than a mouse in someone else's maze. In this business fable, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra encourages readers to control your own destiny rather than chase blindly after it.

If you were a mouse trapped in a maze and someone kept moving the cheese, what would you do?

Over a decade ago the bestselling business fable Who Moved My Cheese? offered its answer to this question: accept that change is inevitable and beyond your control, don't waste your time wondering why things are the way they are, keep your head down, and start looking for the cheese.

But success depends on the ability to push the boundaries, reshape the environment, and play by a different set of rules: our own. With that in mind, Deepak Malhotra offers a radically different answer to this question through an inspiring story about three unique and adventurous mice--Max, Big, and Zed--who refuse to accept their reality as given. As we watch their lives unfold and intersect, we discover that instead of just blindly chasing after the cheese, each of us has the ability to escape the maze or even reconfigure it to our liking.

We often underestimate our ability to control our own destiny and overcome the constraints we face--or think we face. I Moved Your Cheese reminds us that we can create the new circumstances and realities we want, but first we must discard the often deeply ingrained notion that we are nothing more than mice in someone else's maze. As Zed explains, "You see, Max, the problem is not that the mouse is in the maze, but that the maze is in the mouse."

Deepak Malhotra is the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is an advisor to firms around the globe and coauthor (with Max Bazerman) of Negotiation Genius.