Who credit default swapped my cheese?

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

By Spencer Johnson, M.D.

101 pages, available at Powerbooks

It’s not surprising that Spencer Johnson, who wrote The One-Minute Manager back when people were multi-tasking their brains out, and sold millions of the book called Who Moved My Cheese? before anyone had even sniffed out the coming economic meltdown, should pen a third volume to address the current perilous situation.

Peaks and Valleys is shockingly short, more of a Paul Coelho parable than a full-blown business book. But again, readers who are grasping for any sort of advice in a time of economic upheaval (a period that may be more extended than people imagine) will no doubt take its crumbs of wisdom and try to bunker down for the long haul.

Much has changed since Who Moved My Cheese? told people how to handle downsizing, globalization, and all the forces seemingly beyond most employees’ control. That book was also short, dealt in parables, and assured workers by telling them they should try to make themselves indispensable in the workplace, while craftily sniffing out other job and growth opportunities and learning the lay of the land. In other words, it taught workers to be good little cubicle dwellers, with a private stash of self-interest sustaining them.

So far, so good. That’s what people needed to hear as their jobs got shrunk, their hours and benefits cut. The working world should have its own interests in mind, because being simply and blindly loyal to a corporation is no longer a sensible choice in this world. The gold retirement watch just no longer awaits everybody who puts in their 45 years at the office, as movies like Wall Street remind us. Takeovers, leveraging and over-leveraging await us, and big bills to pay for future generations. Businesses are evaporating (even — gulp! — newspapers) even as other enterprises spring up on the worldwide web, which so far has not figured how to extract payment from the freeaholic Netizens of the world.

But that’s no reason to get down, Chucko. This edition from Spencer, M.D., assures us that our attitude to the world’s economic spasms is more important than ever.

To boil Spencer’s book down into bullet points is easy, because he does so himself, providing a detachable cardboard marker at the back of the book that readers can “fold and use as a wallet card.”

In essence, life is full of peaks and valleys, and we must learn to navigate this reality thus:

• To manage your good and bad times, make reality your friend. Ask yourself, “What is the truth of this situation?”

• To get out of valleys sooner, find and use the good hidden in the bad time. Relax, knowing that valleys end. Do the opposite of what got you in the Valley. Get outside yourself: be of more service at work and more loving in life. Avoid comparisons.

• To stay on peaks longer, appreciate and manage your good times. Be humble and grateful. Do more of what got you there. Keep making things better.

• To get to your next peak, follow your Sensible Vision. Imagine yourself enjoying a better future in such specific, believable detail that you soon enjoy doing what takes you there.

• To help people, share this story with others. Teach them to make the good and bad times work for them.

To his credit, Dr. Spencer offers a book that appeals to all walks of life — the disenfranchised worker, the down-in-the-dumps officemate, the ambitious striver who is hoping to master prosperity. Peaks and Valleys is only deceptively simpleminded. It turns out it actually makes sense, and works. Many books, such as The Secret, carry a similar message about shaping your reality by directing your thinking. This technique does seem to bear fruit. Negative thinking, by its very nature, can shut off possibilities. The danger of negative thinking is that it feels comfortable, because people have become used to things not working out. Then they wonder why they feel “stuck in a rut.” Without getting all Dale Carnegie here, the opposite tack — dreaming, thinking of good possibilities, imagining them in detail, working toward them in various ways — has the opposite effect. It frees the mind from boxed-in results, and opens doors to new realities. At least sometimes.

Of course, this message may be more immediately useful and tangible to the person who is trying to resolve a minor creative block than to someone whose home has been repossessed by a bank, who has lost his life savings or is being downsized. It’s all a matter of degree.

But it’s also a matter of perspective, Spencer would say. In uncertain times, we may mistake a peak for a valley, or vice versa. We might not think clearly about our circumstances.

The “peaks and valleys” metaphor is more or less solid, though your could substitute “roller coaster” or “heartbeat” to convey the ups and downs of life. In fact, Spencer does, noting that life’s ups and downs, when charted, resemble our pulsing heartbeat, which, he says, is appropriate because it’s tied to what our heart wants. See? It’s all so simple.

There are a few nods to America’s current economic predicament, as when Spencer has his Peak guru say, “Too many people fail to manage their good times and do not notice that they are creating their own future bad times. They waste too many resources, get away from the basics and ignore what matters most.” He could be talking about the credit binge in the US, the housing boom and overleveraging that led to the dire collapse of key financial institutions. Or he could simply be talking about global warming and the environment.

In short, Peaks and Valleys is simple enough for me to read to my six-year-old daughter, though perhaps not as entertaining as Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go! which tackles similar themes of resilience, wise judgment and life’s often tricky course.