Change Happens
They Keep Moving The Cheese

Anticipate Change
Get Ready For the Cheese To Move

Monitor Change
Smell The Cheese Often So You
Know When It Is Getting Old

Adapt To Change Quickly
The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese,
The Sooner You can Enjoy New Cheese

Change
Move With The Cheese

Enjoy Change!
Savour The Adventure And Enjoy
The Taste Of New Cheese!

Be Ready To Change Quickly
And Enjoy It Again & Again

They Keep Moving The Cheese

“Who Moved My Cheese?” Dr Spencer Johnson, (1998)

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We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes… Our looking is perfected every day–but we see less and less. Never has it been more urgent to speak of seeing… we are on-lookers, spectators… “subjects” we are, that look at “objects.” Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once–and for all. by these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything.

Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

This we know.
All things are connected
like the blood
which unites our family…

Whatever befalls the earth
befalls the sons and daughter’s of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life
he is mereley a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web
he does to himself.

-Chief ‘Seattle’

London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, 2004

A successful person may be a man or a woman, of any race, who has been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research).

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Life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods. Of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behavior of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Given that few things are more in need of criticism (or of insight and analysis) than our approach to status and its distribution, it is hardly surprising that so many artists across time should have created works that in some way contest the methods by which people are accorded rank in society. The history of art is filled with challenges—ironic, angry, lyrical, sad or amusing—to the status system.

The main character, Fanny Price, once ridiculed for owning just one nice dress and speaks no French was sent by her penniless family in Portsmouth to live with her aristocrat uncle Sir Thomas Bertram. Austin reveals Fanny as the one member of her extended family endowed with a noble soul whilst Sir Bertram has let snobbery ruin the education of his children, his daughters have married for money and paid an emotional price for their decision, and his wife has let her heart turn to stone. The hierarchical system of the Bertram household has been turned on its head by the author.

As the reader reaches the end of the novel, they are invited to go back to the real world and respond to its inhabitants as she has taught us to do, detecting and recoiling from greed, arrogance and pride and seeking out the good in ourselves and in others.

Austin’s novels have great ambitions embedded within them. Each one attempts to criticise, and so to alter our lives.

Jane Austin, Mansfield Park

Art: an effective antidote for life’s deepest tensions and anxieties.

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“Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance… If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend… Are they not bound to recognise that they have inferior status, not as in the past because they were denied opportunity, but because they are inferior?”

Michael Young, The Rise of Meritocracy (London, 1958).

Steven Heller:

“Advertising is a tool of capitalism, a con that persuades an unwitting public to consume and consume again. Graphic design, by contrast, is an aesthetic and philosophical pursuit that communicates ideas. Advertising is cultural exploitation that transforms creative expression into crass propaganda”.

Creative Review Feb 2005

It requires but a short leap of imagination to make the assumption that “extreme good conduct” and an assortment of virtues must lie behind the acquisition of cupboards full of linen shirts, fleets of yachts, myriad mansions and jewels.

The very concept status symbol, a costly material object that confers respect upon its owner, rests upon the widespread and not improbable notion that the acquisition of the most expensive goods must inevitably demand the greatest of all qualities of character.

For those made most anxious or embittered by the ideals of their own societies, the history of status, even crudely outlined, cannot but reveal a basic and inspiring point; ideals are not set in stone. Status value have long been, and in the future may again be, subject to alteration, through politics.

By waging political battle, different groups may always attempt to transform the honour systems of their communities and win dignity for themselves over the opposition of those with a stake in the prior arrangement. Through a ballet box, a gun, a strike, or sometimes even a book, these factions will strive to redirect their societies’ notions of who is rightfully owed the privileges that accompany ‘high status’.

Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), poet and critic.

Every great work of art, suggested Arnold, was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery.”

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"A belief is an assumed truth"

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“The dominant discourse consists of an elaborate system of signs that together constitute powerful and convincing myths and it is those that form social and cultural “reality”.

- Roland Barthes