I Moved Your Cheese

For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze

By Deepak Malhotra

The first serious challenge to the iconic bestseller "Who Moved Your Cheese?"

A thoughtful critique written by a Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author that uses the same playful and highly accessible fable format to encourage readers to examine their deeply held assumptions and to take control of their own destiny.

Praise for I Moved Your Cheese :

“…Malhotra tackles our assumptions about business and life with humor, zest, and wisdom in this delightful fable. If you’ve ever rankled at the thought of being just another mouse in the maze, this is the book for you.” -- Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive

“Every once in a while a book comes along that makes you question the way things are. This is the book. Deepak Malhotra allows you to glimpse a world of your own making without the limits and barriers that others create. An excellent read.” --Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Leader in Me

“An excellent book with sound lessons on how to change our circumstance and create new realities in our personal and professional lives.” -- Deepak Chopra, Author of War of the Worldviews and Adjunct Professor, Kellogg School of Management

I Moved Your Cheese takes a different point of view and offers an alternative approach. Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra tells an inspiring story about a new generation of mice who begin to challenge assumptions and ask important questions. Rather than just accepting their situation and dutifully chasing the cheese, Max, Zed, and Big begin looking deeper, examining and reassessing what they’ve been told are their limitations, and set out to chart a new course.

Innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, problem solving, and business growth - as well as personal growth - depend on the ability to challenge accepted notions, reshape the environment, and play by a different set of rules. People are not powerless to change their circumstances. They can control their destiny. By analyzing assumptions about the limitations, readers, like Max, Zed, and Big, discover how to overcome them. But first there is a need to understand the ways that people unknowingly hold themselves back. As Zed explains to Max,  “The problem is not that the mouse is in the maze but that the maze is in the mouse.”

Deepak Malhotra is a professor in the Negotiations, Organizations and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches negotiation in the MBA program, as well as in a wide variety of executive programs, including the Owner/President Management Program, Changing the Game, and Families in Business. Malhotra has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the Faculty Award by Harvard Business School's MBA Class of 2011. He is the coauthor (with Max Bazerman) of Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond, which won the 2008 Outstanding Book Award by the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution.