9780060529574

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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

Introduction

xiii

The Tao of How: Strategies, Tactics, and Diversionary Activities

(30)

Latte Break: Are You a World-Class Liar?

(3)

Friends, Enemies, and Consultants

(31)

Latte Break: The Bing Ethics Test

(3)

You Da Man! Or, Why We Love the Boss

(28)

Latte Break: What's Your EQ?

(3)

Tales from the Political Crypt

(33)

Latte Break: Casey at the Mouse

120

(3)

Big Tech Attack

123

(33)

Latte Break: What's Your Sign?

153

(3)

On the Road Again (and Again)

156

(32)

Latte Break: So, Are Ya Havin' Fun?

184

(4)

The Human Animal

188

(23)

Latte Break: Twenty Good Reasons to Cry

209

(2)

The Man Show

211

(28)

Latte Break: The Auditor

236

(3)

This Just In: Stuff That Really Happened

239

(42)

Latte Break: The Love Song of Alfred E. Neuman

278

(3)

What, Me Worry?

281

(35)

Latte Break: The Broker: A Poem of Gothic Horror

314

(2)

Up and Out

316

(29)

Latte Break: Business Haiku

341

(4)

Last Words (for the time being)

345

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

The Big Bing
Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe

Chapter One

The Tao of How: Strategies,Tactics, and Diversionary Activities

You have to walk before you can run. Then later, when you're running, you need more sophisticated guidance, because doing a bunch of important things while running isn't all that easy.
In the beginning, as opposed to now, I really didn't know what I was doing. So thefirst things I looked at were overall strategies to very simple things that turned out to be a lot harder than they looked. Giving good phone. Taking lunch with distinction. Considering how to tackle the everyday tactical challenges that, taken together, could help define a career.
No issue was too small. Back at the start, or instance, before I got my wind going, I got tired in the afternoons and very often wanted a nap. It took me a while to work out a strategy to get one in without getting egregiously busted. Finally, I did it. First, I never took a nap through a phone call. If the phone rang on my desk, I woke and answered it. That was rule one. Second, I decided one day to sleep on the floor with my head against the door. That way if somebody came in without knocking, the door would hit me on the head and wake me. If asked, I could say I was doing my back exercises. Nobody wants to rag on a guy with a bad back. So that was my nap strategy. And it worked.
Other strategies followed about increasingly complex issues. It has turned out, in the end, that the need to think about the nuts and bolts never goes away. At every point of a working career, the issue of How must be managed -- and the first step in that battle is to view every problem as a puzzle that can be solved not with emotion, not with will or gumption or moxie, but with the proper strategy. This puts you, no matter how low-down you are on the food chain, on the same footing as the pasty executives who make nothing but decisions and money all day.

Protecting Your Turf

In the beginning, there was my turf. And I beheld it, and it was very tiny. There were more of us then, back when the corporation was young and centralized. The landscape swarmed with associates and directors and vice presidents so numerous that, when they massed, the hillside hummed for miles around. Each of us tended his proud little patch of duties, met with pals around the watering hole at sundown, and, for the most part, coveted not his neighbor's ass. Then the plague of merger fell upon our house, and many good folk were swept away. Vast tracts lay ripe for conquest, and we who survived took pretty much what we wanted. Before long I found myself steward of quite a nice chunk of real estate, with nary a shot fired in anger.

Then came the post-Armageddon wasteland that is now upon us. Where before there was me and Chuck and Ted and Fred and Phyllis and Janice and Lenny, now there's simply me and Lenny. And Lenny, I'm sorry to say, is a classic turf-fresser, slavering on mine while he gibbers possessively over his own. I come in some mornings to find him squatting with a disingenuous expression in what used to be my backyard. "You've soaked up a lot of turf that used to be mine, Len," I told him recently over a morning cup of coffee. "If you want war, it's okay by me, but I warn you -- I won't lose." Since then, Lenny and I have enjoyed a nice sense of collegiality. We even have a chat once every couple of days about what we're up to, more or less. But I'm not fooled. Hitler didn't stop at Prague when the tasty little Balkans lay at his feet, and Lenny won't either.

Turf is the work that no one but you should be doing. But it's more. It's the proprietary relationships you have with people -- the human glue that holds your career together. Like all great things in life, it's most important to those who don't get much. "If you're secure in your job, and you have a well-defined position with a lot of responsibility, turf doesn't become that big an issue," says my friend Steve, senior manager at a publishing company. Good attitude, when all that's challenged is your right to fund an opinion survey or something. But there are times when something more fundamental is threatened. Keep the following in mind:

Try not to act like a thumb-sucking worm. A lot of very uptight people are drawn to the world of business, who knows why. But few are as minimal as those who scrab around clutching worthless sod to their bosoms. I've seen guys haggle over who has the duty, nay, the honor, of ordering the chairman's muffin. "Real turf is something you have an emotional investment in," says a young powermeister I know, "that, if you lost it, would take away a real part of you." So take what you need and leave the rest.

The turf you make is equal to the bows you take. Recognition begets turf. When I was a new recruit, I was given the chore of assembling the department's monthly reports to the chairman. This gently bubbling pot of self-aggrandizement was routinely signed by my erstwhile vice president. As a neophyte in the business world, it never occurred to me that my work should be attributed to someone else. It was three months before Chuck, in a spasm of assiduity, perused my output and noticed my name, not his, affixed to the title page. By then it was impossible for him to re-create the fiction that he was solely responsible. Thus did I attain my first visible piece of soil ...

The Big Bing
Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe. Copyright © by Stanley Bing. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from The Big Bing: Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe by Stanley Bing
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