We have a little book club at the Clinic.
It's centred around a slack channel and for those of you who have read any of this blog before and will continue to read it, you'll understand more about slack and how important it is for communication in our business.
But our little book club and Slack channel allows us just to share books and to pass them on to each other in our little community setting for those of us who enjoy reading.
A little while ago within that channel, I watched the book ‘Who moved My Cheese?’ by Dr Spencer Johnson, circulate around as people started to read it and really seemed to start to enjoy it.
And then it was left on the table outside my office, where the book club books sometimes lie for people to pick up.
I've never become aware of this before, but it's interesting that on the front of the book, the quote from The Daily Telegraph is ‘one of the most successful business books ever’ which is amazing because it's only 90 pages long in really big text and very basic and simple in its first reading and first viewing.
Dr Spencer Johnson worked with Kenneth Blanchard on ‘The One Minute Manager’, which became a fantastic and really, really prolific business book around the world.
It was Blanchard who encouraged Johnson to write ‘Who moved my Cheese?’ after he used to tell the story regularly to people who are struggling as circumstances started to change and move and the sand beneath their feet started to shift.
And so, I decided to pick it up and take it home for the start of the sabbatical and read it several times in the first couple of weeks.
It really is an extraordinary, simple piece of work, but sometimes the simplest things are the most amazing, because they take concepts which are complex and difficult to understand, and they put them in a form that we can get quite easily.
It's a little bit Americanised but no more so than ‘The E-myth’ by Michael Gerber, which is one of the books that I’ve recommended the most in my life.
And so, if you are ever struggling with change or know people who might have difficulty with coping with change, I recommend that you get this book and read it and then give it to them.
And when I ask ‘if you are struggling with change’ that probably applies to every single person who would ever read this blog.
Change now is inevitable in our lives more than it ever has been before.
Society is changing at a rate which is faster than we can almost comprehend.
And so, the ability to rationalise this in a really simple metaphor and understand that although we’re frightened of what might be coming next and we would like the good old days to come back. They're not coming, and so it's time to move along.
This is a gift almost anonymously given to me, although I know the people in the practice who shouted about it the most and I'd like to pass it on to you so, please have a look if you're struggling.
It will probably take you about 30 minutes to read it, but you’ll probably read it five or six times, and then you can pass it on to someone else.
Interestingly, as part of my sabbatical time, I'm off to CP Riverside as I write this, which is the school where I'm chair of governors (I'm a governor at two different schools, but I'm chair at CP).
CP Riverside is an extraordinary place where young people who are excluded from mainstream education, for whatever reason, might end up trying to help them rebuild their lives and get on a better pathway to a future that's brighter than it was before.
CP Riverside only ever has 51 young people as a maximum, but it has been such a privilege to be involved with that school and such a privilege to be involved with the head teacher, Mark Eyre who’s quite an inspirational young man making a massive difference in society to young people who are otherwise left behind.
Today I've been asked to do 10 minutes to the team on an inset day about change, and I think probably all I will be talking about is ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’.
Good luck with that and I hope you like it.
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Blog Post Number - 3323
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