Fri, Apr 05, 2002 page19

• Stanley Bing, workplace mystic, throws an elephant at his bosses

  • By Joe Mysak / BLOOMBERG
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  Stanley Bing, whose book Throwing the Elephant is making a run at the bestseller lists, is at work on a new novel everyone on Wall Street can appreciate.

  It's called, You Look Nice Today and is about "the effect that a loss of status has on a person who's come a certain way in their life," says Bing. "It's about loss of context, what it does to character, both good and bad."

  The book will be published by Bloomsbury next spring.

  Maybe by then Wall Street will stop firing people. Bing, whose real name is Gil Schwartz, a senior vice president of corporate communications at CBS, says the novel will be "deeper, sharper," than his 1999 novel, Lloyd: What Happened, and there won't be any business graphics -- tables and pie charts and the like -- this time around.

  It will still be pretty funny, because Bing is one of the funniest columnists writing about business life today. He might be one of the only funny columnists writing about business today, come to think of it, and because of that his work is a real tonic, both in Fortune, where his column now appears, and on the business and management shelves of your local bookstore, where so much otherwise deadly stuff resides.

  Bing's book is called Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up. It is getting a lot of attention right now because "how to relate to authority is an important subject," says Bing. His previous book was, What Would Machiavelli Do?

  The author starts right out by dropping a bomb on those other business books, all of which are "based on the idea that power can be managed through rational means. It can't," he advises.

  "It is only through a leap of faith that one may gain one's footing in the tumultuous, slippery terrain in which unruly, unreasoning, selfish, mean, crafty, manipulative, infantile, and belligerent power can be managed." He continues, "Only the power of Zen concentration will result in a happy business life for the subordinate who yearns for understanding, control, and enlightenment."

  I met Bing for breakfast at Michael's, which is one of those Manhattan restaurants where, to paraphrase the man himself, big dogs go to groom each other's fur. He said his new book marked a logical progression on the subject of bosses. The first was Crazy Bosses. The next was the Machiavelli book, which was subtitled The Ends Justify the Meanness.

  Those books described bosses, more often than not using their own words. The new book describes how to deal with them. Because, as Bing says, quoting one of his former chiefs, "You can't choose your boss." In other words, this is how work works. Most people spend a whole lot of time bitterly complaining about their bosses, thinking somehow, somewhere, there is an ideal job out there where bosses won't act ... like bosses -- or, as Bing calls them here, elephants.

  Bing walks you through the whole process of managing up, and it is a dull boy or girl who won't find a lot of resonance here with their own experiences. The chapters are all pithy, and include such subjects as "Presenting Alternative Strategies to the Elephant," "Convincing the Elephant That It Was the Elephant's Idea," and "Frightening the Elephant with Mice." What does this have to do with municipal bonds, you may well ask. Bankers who work on municipal bond issues still spend a lot of time on planes traveling to see their customers, and the other week one of them asked me for a book suggestion. This is it.

  Bing in person is a pretty serious fellow, although we did manage to discuss the recurring theme of bacon and pigs-in-blankets in his works. He says that all his elephants have been superb, and approving of the work he does under the pseudonym Stanley Bing. He admits that Gil Schwartz gets better tables at restaurants.
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