Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up by Stanley Bing

Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up by Stanley Bing

Stanley Bing follows his enormously successful What Would Machiavelli Do? with another subversively humorous exploration of how work would be different--if the Buddha were your personal consultant.

What would the Buddha do--if he had to deal with a rampaging elephant of a boss every day? That is the premise of Stanley Bing's wickedly funny guide to finding inner peace in the face of relentlessly obnoxious, huge, and sometimes smelly bosses. Taking the concept of managing up to a new cosmic plateau, Bing urges no less than a revolution of the spirit in the American workplace, turning overwrought, oppressed, stressed-out employees into models of Zen-like powers of concentration, able to take their elephant-like bosses and grey, lumbering companies and twirl them around the little finger of their consciousness.

In Bing's unique tradition of social criticism cum business self-help, Throwing the Elephant presents Four Truths (or possibly Five), a Ninefold Path, and one useful, hilarious guide to workplace sanity, success, and enlightenment that surpasses all understanding, survival.

Stanley Bing is a bestselling fiction and nonfiction author who has written for Esquire, Fortune, and a variety of other major periodicals for many years. He is the author of nearly a dozen books that push the frontiers of satire and hard-nosed corporate strategy. Crazy Bosses, which forecast much of the present political climate by mapping the relationship between pathology and power; What Would Machiavelli Do, which addressed why cruel people typically do better than good people; and, most recently, The Curriculum, a comprehensive substitute for the traditional MBA curriculum. Lloyd: What Happened, You Look Good Today, and Immortal Life are his three novels.