We live in a vicious, highly competitive workplace environment, and things aren't getting any better. Jobs are few and far between, and people aren't any nicer now than they were when Ghengis Khan ran around in big furs killing people in unfriendly acquisitions. For thousands of years, people have been reading the writings of the deeply wise, but also extremely dead Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, who was perhaps the first to look on the waging of war as a strategic art that could be taught to people who wished to be warlords – and other kinds of senior managers.
In a nutshell, Sun Tzu taught that readiness is all, that knowledge of oneself and the enemy is the foundation of strength and that those who fight best are those who are prepared and wise enough not to fight at all. Unfortunately, in the current day, this approach is pretty much horse hockey, a fact that has not been recognised by the bloated, tree–hugging Sun Tzu industry, which churns out mushy–gushy pseudo–philosophy for business school types who want to make war and keep their hands clean.
]]>At the same time, you may not be emotionally-or financially-ready to hang it all up. Which is why, whether you're a withered graybeard or a teeny young future hotshot in leather jodhpurs, you need Stanley Bing's global positioning system for a sane and pleasantly successful life: Executricks, or How to Retire While You're Still Working.
Bing is the ultimate corporate insider, one who has attained nosebleed altitude and worked long and hard enough to lose his desire to work long and hard enough. Over time, he has watched the power players who have made their jobs into a waking festival of indolence and fun, and gleaned a vast range of executricks they have developed over the years, based around several core concepts:
<ul> <li>Delegation, or getting other people to do the stuff you don't want to</li> <li>Absence, or the ability to get "work" done while not being physically on the scene</li> <li>Abuse of status</li> <li>Acting visionary when confused </li> <li>Intense engagement (used only in crisis) </li> </ul>A wellspring of executricks flow from these simple precepts, including:
<ul> <li>The use of the cell phone and BlackBerry to establish a permanent state of simultaneous Omniscience and Not-Presence </li> <li>Roping off mealtimes as zones of defensible entitlement </li> <li>Travel as an alternative to work </li> <li>The art of the nap</li> <li>Golf-the ultimate dodge </li> <li>Philanthropy and social activism, a pleasant parallel universe </li> </ul>Executricks is the most precious of resources for those who work hard but would rather be hardly working: a secret handbook that lays bare the stratagems of those who have already ascended to the pinnacles of power. No office, home, or backpack should be without a dog-eared copy. Early adopters earn extra points.
]]>Bing is at his best when describing Lloyd's many idiosyncrasies: what he buys when grocery shopping, his love of his dog Steve, his appraisal of various beers. For example: "There was Foster's lager, which was average beer but came in an enormous can, which was not something to be sneezed at. When one's wife said, 'How many beers have you had?' on the cusp of driving off to someplace social of an early evening, the honest Foster's husband could say 'One!' and not be criticized, even though that one beer was the equivalent of two gigantic tankards of lusty ale."
Lloyd includes a portfolio of full-color presentations chock full of business clip art that graphs everything from the "Number of Laughs Enjoyed in Lloyd's Corporation As a Function of Profit Growth" and "Suit Size As a Function of Income/Vodka Consumption" to an examination of "What Lloyd Eats" and a summary of Lloyd's travels in Germany. If you enjoyed Stanley Bing in Esquire and Fortune, then you'll find that Lloyd is a must read. Bing's good humor captures many of the follies of business life that most readers will recognize and appreciate. --Harry C. Edwards
]]>In What Would Machiavelli Do?, Bing looked at the issue of why mean people do better than nice people, and found that in their particular form of insanity lay incredible power. In Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up, he offered a spiritual path toward managing the unruly executive beast. And in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, he taught us how to become one of them, and wage war on the playing field that ends in a dream home in Cabo. Now he returns to his roots to offer the last word on the entity that shapes our lives and stomps through—and on—our dreams: The Crazy Boss.
Students of Bing—and there are many, secreted inside tortured organizations, yearning for blunt instruments with which to fight—will note that he has walked this ground before, looking for answers. In 1992, he published the first edition of Crazy Bosses, which was fine, as far as it went. Now, some 15 years and several dozen insane bosses later, he has updated and rethought much of the work. Back in the last century, Bing was a small, trembling creature, looking up at those who made his life miserable and analyzing the mental illness that gave them their power. Today, while still trembling much of the time, he is in fact one of those people his prior work has warned us against. His own hard-won wisdom and now institutionalized dementia make this new edition completely fresh and indispensable to anyone who works for somebody else or lives with somebody else, or would like to.
In short, Bing is back on his home turf in this funny, true, and essential book, peering with his keen and frosty eye at the crazy boss in all his guises: the Bully, the Paranoid, the Narcissist, the Wimp, and the self-destructive Disaster Hunter. If you loved the original, classic Crazy Bosses, you'll be thrilled to plunge back into the new, refurbished pool. If you are new to the book, strap yourself in: it's going to be a crazy ride.
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