Johnson, Spencer 1938-

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JOHNSON, Spencer 1938-

PERSONAL: Born November 24, 1938, in Watertown, SD; son of J. O. (a designer) and Madeline (Sankey) Johnson; married Ann Donegan, June 21, 1968 (divorced, 1978); remarried; children: Cameron, Emerson. Education: University of Southern California, B.A. (psychology), 1963; Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland), M.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES: Office—Who Moved My Cheese?, 1775 West 2300 S., Suite B, Salt Lake City, UT 84119. Agent—Sterling International, 611 North Elmhurst Rd., Suite 226, Prospect Heights, IL 60070.

CAREER: Medtronic, Minneapolis, MN, director of medical communications, 1970-72; Value Communications, La Jolla, CA, chairman, 1974-77; University of California—San Diego, consultant to School of Medicine, 1977-79; Candle Communications, La Jolla, CA, chairman, beginning 1982; Institute for Inter-Disciplinary Studies, research physician; Center for the Study of the Person, consultant; Harvard Business School, leadership fellow.

WRITINGS:

(With Kenneth Blanchard) One-Minute Manager, Blanchard-Johnson (La Jolla, CA), 1981, Morrow (New York, NY), 1982.

The Precious Present, Celestial Arts (Millbrae, CA), 1981.

The One-Minute Father: The Quickest Way to Help Children Learn How to Like Themselves and Want to Behave Themselves, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.

The One-Minute Mother: The Quickest Way to Help Children Learn How to Like Themselves and Want to Behave Themselves, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.

The One-Minute Sales Person: The Quickest Way to More Sales with Less Stress, Morrow (New York, NY), 1984, 2002.

One Minute for Myself: A Small Investment, a Big Reward, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

The One-Minute Teacher: How to Teach Others to Teach Themselves, Morrow (New York, NY), 1986.

"Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, Putnam (New York, NY), 1998.

Who Moved My Cheese? Little Nibbles of Cheese, Stark Books (Kansas City, MO), 2001.

Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens: An A-Mazing Way to Change and Win!, Putnam (New York, NY), 2002.

Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids: An A-Mazing Way to Change and Win!, Putnam (New York, NY), 2003.

The Present: The Gift That Makes You Happy and Successful at Work and in Life, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2003.

"VALUETALES" SERIES; FOR CHILDREN

The ValueTale of the Wright Brothers: The Value of Patience, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1975, published as The Value of Patience, 1976.

The ValueTale of Elizabeth Fry: The Value of Kindness, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1975, published as The Value of Kindness, 1976.

The ValueTale of Louis Pasteur: The Value of Believing in Yourself, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1975, published as The Value of Believing in Yourself, 1976.

The Value of Humor: The Story of Will Rodgers, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1976.

The Value of Courage: The Story of Jackie Robinson, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1977.

The Value of Curiosity: The Story of Christopher Columbus, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1977.

The Value of Imagination: The Story of Charles Dickens, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1977.

The Value of Saving: The Story of Benjamin Franklin, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1978.

The Value of Sharing: The Story of the Mayo Brothers, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1978.

The Value of Honesty: The Story of Confucius, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1979.

The Value of Understanding: The Story of Margaret Mead, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1979.

The Value of Fantasy: The Story of Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1979.

The Value of Dedication: The Story of Albert Schweitzer, illustrated by Steve Pileggi, Value Communications (La Jolla, CA), 1979.

Johnson's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

ADAPTATIONS: The One-Minute Father was released on audiocassette by Nightingale-Conant (Champaign, IL), 1983; Who Moved My Cheese? was recorded and released on audiocassette by Simon & Schuster Audio (New York, NY), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: Until his Who Moved My Cheese: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life became a nationwide bestseller, Dr. Spencer Johnson was best known for his 1981 business title, The One-Minute Manager, in which he and coauthor Kenneth Blanchard offered business leaders a three-pronged plan for success. All that changed when Johnson finally listened to Blanchard and wrote down an anecdote that Johnson had created about mice, men, and cheese. Who Moved My Cheese, which was at first sold through Johnson's own company and to business clients, gained a following among a wider audience. Since its 1998 debut with a major New York publisher, the work has gone through eleven printings, selling more than eleven million copies within four years. Johnson later presented his parable about adaptability in separate versions for young adults and children, and provided ancillary materials for businesses through his Who Moved My Cheese Web site.

Who Moved My Cheese? features four characters who represent parts of a personality, live in a maze (read "life"), and look for cheese (read "whatever a person wants in life") to make themselves happy. Two of these characters are the mice Sniff and Scurry, and two are little people called Hem and Haw. When one day the cheese is moved to another part of the maze, the characters each react differently, some moving on, while others become stuck. After Johnson later told Blanchard about how he was using this paradigm to improve his own life, Blanchard told the "Cheese" story to business managers in his world-wide management seminars. After years of using the story, Blanchard insisted that Johnson put the tale on paper. Johnson did, and then he tested early versions on hundreds of friends and associates. "I listened to what people were saying they wanted in a book about dealing with change, and I've gotten to be very good at listening after twenty years of this," Johnson told Kate Fitzgerald of Advertising Age.

At first, Who Moved My Cheese? sold 500,000 copies without much notice, and then through word-of-mouth advertising, it became a runaway bestseller, landing on several best-seller lists, among them the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Leaders of companies purchased large quantities to give to their employees. Although Johnson wrote Who Moved My Cheese? with business people as his intended audience, it had great crossover appeal to general audiences because, as a Planet IT reviewer expressed it, "It's a simple parable that reveals profound truths about change." Readers have hardly been nonplussed, either liking or disliking the work. In a Fortune article, Johnson is quoted as saying: "A minority of readers hate the book—'hate' with a capital 'H.'" Yet "more impressive is that many of the book's biggest fans are hardheaded business people; they are reading it, recommending it, and using it at their companies," Fortune's Geoffrey Colvin wrote.

Adapting Who Moved My Cheese? for a young adult audience came next. "There was extensive teenage traffic on the book's Web site, and many who had read their parents' copies said that the book had made a big difference in their lives," Johnson told Sally Lodge of Publishers Weekly. "But they also said that they wished that the story could be told to relate to issues that concern kids their age." Although Johnson had no teenagers of his own, he thought about modern teenagers being the people whose lives change at a faster pace than anyone else's. So with the input of Teen magazine writer Cylin Busby, who gave Johnson insight into the issues that most concern modern teenagers, Johnson rewrote Who Moved My Cheese? with teens in mind, telling the same story with a more youth-oriented beginning and ending. Before sending it to a publisher, he tested it on this audience. "I passed the new book to many teenagers," he told Lodge, "and as I received feedback, I tweaked and added nuances to the teenage conversation that takes place in the book. I was constantly changing the dialogue." Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens: An A-Mazing Way to Change and Win!, geared to readers age ten and older, appeared in 2002. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a critic suggested that the book's theme about "anticipating, accepting, and using change to improve one's life" would be of use to teen readers.

A picture book version, Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids: An A-Mazing Way to Change and Win!, appeared in 2003. Though Johnson had not written any books for children since the mid-1970s, when he and illustrator Steve Pileggi put out the "ValueTales" series, Johnson told Lodge, that he "was really excited about writing for the picture-book audience again."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advertising Age, March 26, 2001, Kate Fitzgerald, "Superstar Spencer Johnson," p. S6.

Booklist, February 15, 2001, Mary Frances Wilkens, review of Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life (audio version), p. 1164; December 1, 2002, Ilene Cooper, review of Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens: An A-Mazing Way to Change and Win!, p. 654.

Fortune, November 22, 1999, Geoffrey Colvin, "Behold the Power of Cheese," review of Who Moved My Cheese?, p. 363; August 14, 2000, Geoffrey Colvin, "Who Moved My Cheese to Harvard?," p. 64.

Library Journal, October 15, 1999, Mark Guyer, review of Who Moved My Cheese? (audio version), p. 124.

Multicultural Review, July, 1992, Martin Goldberg, "Searching for Columbus," review of The Value of Curiosity: The Story of Christopher Columbus, pp. 10-12.

New York, January 24, 2000, Johanna Berkman, "Of Mice and Zen," review of Who Moved My Cheese?, p. 45.

New York Times, October 7, 1982.

People, December 13, 1982; May 1, 2000, Cynthia Sanz, "Pages," review of Who Moved My Cheese?, p. 41.

Planet IT, July 4, 2000, review of Who Moved My Cheese?.

Publishers Weekly, August 26, 1983; August 1, 1986, review of The One-Minute Sales Person: The Quickest Way to More Sales with Less Stress, p. 74; May 11, 1992, review of "Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions, p. 61; December 10, 2001, "Just Say Cheese," p. 18; September 30, 2002, Sally Lodge, "'Cheese' No Longer Stands Alone," pp. 28-29, and "New Cheese for Teens," review of Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens, p. 74; September 22, 2003, review of The Present: The Gift That Makes You Happy and Successful at Work and in Life, p. 100.

Reader's Digest, May, 2001, Max Alexander, "Who Moved My Cheese?" (interview), pp. 35-38.

San Diego Union/Tribune (San Diego, CA), August 20, 1982.

San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1982.

School Library Journal, January, 2003, Jana R. Fine, review of Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens.

Washington Post, September 27, 1982.