Stanley Bing first made his appearance in Esquire magazine in 1984, writing scurrilous things about his employers and friends and giving strategic advice to those even more befuddled than he. Rather than risk expulsion from his crabby corporate environment, he created the Bing pseudonym in order to observe and criticize the executive class while at the same time aspiring to its lifestyle. This strategy has for all intents and purposes paid off big-time. Since 1995, Bing has been sniping at the hand that feeds him in the pages of Fortune magazine while functioning as an ultra-haute executive at a huge multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst-kept secrets in business.
Bing is also the author of the national bestsellers Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up and What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness, and of the novels Lloyd: What Happened and You Look Nice Today.
A corporate mole's-eye view of the society in which we all live and toil, creating one of the most entertaining, thought provoking, and just plain funny bodies of work in contemporary letters.
Stanley Bing knows whereof he speaks. He has lived the last two decades working inside a gigantic multinational corporation, kicking and screaming all the way up the ladder. He has seen it all -- mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, the death of the three-martini lunch -- and has himself been painfully re-engineered a number of times. He has eaten and drunk way too much, stayed in hotels far too good for him, waited for limousines in the pouring rain, and enjoyed it all. Sort of. Most importantly, Bing has seen management at its best and worst, and has practiced both as he made the transition from an inexperienced player who hated pompous senior management to a polished strategist who kind of sees its point of view now and then.
In one essential volume, here is all you need to know to master your career, your life, and when necessary, other weaker life forms.