Change

I’m interested in change and, particularly, how we respond to change. While I was working at JPMorgan in 2003, a book was doing the rounds called something like ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’. Frankly, it could have been a pamphlet but it had been padded out to a book concerned with some mice who find a load of cheese in the same place every day. One day, the cheese isn’t there and the book is about how the different mice cope. 

The complete losers in the story are the ones who spend all their time lamenting the fact that the cheese is gone, without doing anything else. At the other extreme, our heroes are the ones who accept that the cheese has gone and head off to find cheese somewhere else. It’s a simple story but it’s a good lesson.

However, the book deals with change that directly affects us, not with peripheral change. There are lots of things around us that change that we grumble about but I think that often we don’t offset those against all of the positive change.

For instance, this evening when I left my car in the market square, this van was parked up, selling wood fired pizzas. Now, I am not against a wood fired pizza, let’s be quite straight about that. But this was a new thing: we’ve not had fast food vans parked up in the square before. And my natural response was to be a bit put out by it. Really, though, it’s not doing any harm and, who knows, I might fancy a wood fired pizza one evening when I get back from work and can’t be bothered to cook.

You know, in 1988 I was sat around one evening with some friends and I claimed that one day we’d have all our music available to us on a device the size of a cigarette lighter. I’m not sure I really believed that - I doubted it as I said it but figured none of these people with me would remember the conversation and call me out on it in years to come - but just over a decade  later we had the iPod. I didn’t have the faintest suspicion about the cloud, though, and being able to stream music on demand over a ‘phone that I could take anywhere with me. 

On balance, though, I’ll exchange the Internet, Web, smartphones, tablets, 3G, 4G, Spotify, MP3s, Netflix, Dropbox, Tado, iTunes Match, e-commerce, online banking, contactless, and all the other science fiction aspects of my life for the small change of a van on the square. Tory governments? Well, that’s a different argument.