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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN June 20, 2004 Issue 
The Big Bing By Stanley Bing Harper Business (An Imprint of Harper Collins) 2003 
The Tangled Webs We Weave When We Practice To Deceive Finally, a book about management that is pure unadulterated fun to read! A book that does not drone on and on in the incomprehensible Dilbert Speak unless it satirizes it! A book about all those pompous and ridiculous management and corporate practices for the most part designed to deceive, that you might have noticed but were afraid to criticize! That book is "The Big Bing" by management nemesis Stanley Bing. The author became famous or infamous (depending one one's station in life) in 1984 writing for "Esquire" magazine vitriolic snippets about the mostly unethical practices of "people in charge." Since 1995 he has been writing similar invective pieces for "Fortune" magazine. "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," the book's cover informs us. Besides being a valuable book "for everyone who works for a living (or would like to)," "The Big Bing" is an expose of management practices and corporate culture. It also gives valuable tips on how to survive and even advance in that treacherous world. In the very first chapter, "The Tao of How" the author tells us that "the very 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...on the same footing as the pasty executives who make nothing but decisions and money all day." Bing exposes these executives and advises us how to beat them at their own game - the importance of the office doors, desks and telephones in the protection of one's turf, how to get back at mean bosses, how to lie and many other bits of advice on how to succeed in business in general. In Bing's opinion the things that stand the most in the way of succeeding are resumes and interviews. "Books may recommend putting your hopes and dreams on your resume, but let me tell you...," writes Bing. "It's stupid. No body cares that you're looking for "a personally expanding opportunity that will help me deliver on my potential...."" An interview that carries on the same type of language is doomed. Instead of these convoluted and meaningless phrases and slogans, "you could have made me feel that being with you for a couple of years would be fun," writes Bing. "You could have made me like you. I wanted to!" Bing touches upon every aspect of working in a top management position - consulting, working from home, women bosses, casual business dressing and casual Fridays, drinking of the job and the "three-martini lunch." We've all experienced at one time or another some of the situations Bing describes here. But as I kept on reading, I sensed an odd familiarity with those skewed philosophies and began to search my memories for a link. When I came to America I was a fourteen-year old indoctrinated with slogans like "who doesn't work (or toil), doesn't get to eat" and ideas about the worth of accumulated labor. I saw with my own eyes that indeed, what I had been taught by commie propaganda about America was true - it's streets were not gold-studded, those who did not work (the "pasty" execs) were actually getting the big bucks and the three-martini lunches and those who really did work, like the people who cleaned the execs' offices and bathrooms, got paid a pittance. Not long after I witnessed the exploitation of the proles in America first hand, I made another startling discovery. The Party bosses, commissars and big communists did not work either but got the big bucks and privileges denied to those who cleaned their bathrooms. I realized that American executives and communist officials were equally power hungry and deceitful. Feared, because of the arbitrary ways they could abuse their power, they were treated like God-anointed kings. Both equally exploited and destroyed those below them when in their best interests. The language was different, but the outcome the same. The charlatan dealings of Enron and its other comrades-in-crime have eroded a little more the already tenuous distinction between American corporate executives and communists. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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