Product Description

If an elephant stomps on your head and there is no one around to see it, did it stomp on your head at all?

The answer is yes, if that elephant is your boss. Can anything be done about these enormous, gray, and sometimes smelly beasts? The answer is yes, if you know Business Zen. For thousands of years, Zen masters have plumbed the secrets of the universe while wearing comfortable clothing. Now you, too, can learn the wisdom of the ancients and win valuable prizes.

It may be easier than you dare to imagine. Don't you already spend a good part of your day sitting and thinking about nothing for hours on end? That's Zen! You're already doing it!

In this simple little handbook, Throwing the Elephant, Stanley Bing, the master of Machiavellian meanness, offers the nicest possible way to manipulate one's executive elephant to achieve enlightenment -- and power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77612 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-01
• Released on: 2003-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060934224
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Stanley Bing's Throwing the Elephant, subtitled Zen and the Art of Managing Up, is a wise and hilarious--mostly hilarious--antidote to the extensive library of works by grim, clenched-fisted business gurus. Bing posits that power strategies cannot be "managed through rational means." Real success--corporate-niche enlightenment--comes only by embracing religion, specifically Zen Buddhism. This enables one to take "an object of enormous weight and size" (i.e. the elephantine boss) and "mold it ... like a ball of Silly Putty." In truth, he continues, senior management is "the silliest putty of them all." Bing doles out his thoughts in dozens of pithy chapters ("Playing Golf with the Elephant," "Getting Drunk with the Elephant"). He also includes many visual aids (some of which nearly make sense) and adds a sprinkling of the wisdom of others--from Martha Stewart and Jimmy Hoffa to the rock band the Doors--to make his wickedly entertaining points. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly
In a spoof of just about every career advice and management-by-metaphor book ever created, Bing (What Would Machiavelli Do?) delivers a Zen-like guide to managing your boss. The premise? Here's what Buddha would tell you if he were your personal career coach. A book juxtaposing faux-Zen advice with embarrassing corporate situations (e.g., how to handle a drunken boss) is almost guaranteed to be funny. Bing, "an ultra-senior officer at an elephantine corporation," has plenty of firsthand anecdotes to tell, and he supplements them with stories about some of the notoriously toughest bosses on the planet, like Martha Stewart and Citigroup's Sandy Weill. There are chapters on critiquing your boss ("any bitter pill of criticism one offers an elephant must be buried within a vast tub of cream cheese") and "facing the angry elephant" (when you're to blame for your boss's anger, "breathe deeply. Breath is life"). Despite the amusing anecdotes, though, Bing's narrative can become a bit wearying if one reads more than a couple of chapters in one sitting. However, if an employee only breaks out Bing's book when the elephant is having a particularly bad couple of weeks, enlightenment is certain.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Bing (What Would Machiavelli Do?) has written a clever book on how to manage elephants, a.k.a. bosses. According to the author, "only the power of Zen contemplation will result in a happy business life for the subordinate who yearns for understanding, control, and enlightenment. It is the practice of Business Zen that will enable you, in the end, after much trial and failure, to throw the elephant who is your boss." Through case studies and guidelines, Bing discusses steps to achieving control over the elephant, with such practical chapters as "Greeting the Elephant," "Rejoicing with the Elephant," and "Getting a Leash on the Elephant." Here, for instance, Bing's advice on greetings: "A quick handshake and formal greeting in an elevator is appropriate. A gushing invocation of lifelong admiration for the elephant is not." Witty and thought-provoking, this imaginative and unique work is recommended for public libraries and practitioners and students of business. Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Elephants in life
The elephant referred to in this title of this witty and joyfully manipulative little book is your boss, the powerful but lumbering and self-involved authority figure that Fortune columnist Stanley Bing believes is comfortably ensconced in your company's corner office. Bing begins his manual on the care and feeding of these "business elephants" with the admonition that people don't get to choose their bosses; like the weather or gravity, bosses exist as laws of nature that exceed the control of the mere mortal mosquitoes that hover about them. "Throwing the Elephant" is likely to become the kind of book that people start reading because it makes them laugh and end up giving to their friends because there's so much to learn from it. While it's a little lopsided to see the boss/employee dynamic as exclusively a power-based relationship, there's still a lot of wisdom about corporate life packed into this little book, which, like the "Dilbert" cartoons, succeeds in suggesting aspects of workplace culture that almost everyone can relate to. Now, of course, someone needs to write a book for the elephants, telling them how to deal with those pesky mosquitoes who keep buzzing around them, clamoring for attention and drinking up their lifeblood. I also highly recommend another little book of wisdom titled "Open Your Mind, Open Your Life" by Taro Gold which has helped me greatly deal with the elephants in my life!

Entertaining read with a good overall message.
"Throwing the Elephant" deals with the situation that the majority of us have had to face at one point or the other...just exactly what do we do with this great big elephant (read: manager) that is towering over us? Throuout the book you will find tales of the Buddha fast forwarded into the modern day in support of the ideas that the author wishes you to learn in order to deal with the elephant at hand. The topics range from how to prepare yourself for the first meeting with the elephant, keeping the elephant well fed, and even how to deal with your own inner elephant. While I do have some experience with Zen in other areas, the lessons that are given throughout the book are easily grasped regardless of any familiarity with the concepts behind Zen.

While this book is focused primarily on the elephants that you encounter in your work a day world, the information is helpful in any situation where you may encounter elephants in your life. If you are looking for a quick read that will have you laughing to yourself, while learning how to deal with elephants and still maintain a sense of calm and serenity, then this book is for you.

Thank goodness I've left the corporate world
I discovered this great book after starting my own business, having left my cubicle at a large wireless telecom firm only a few months prior. I wish I had read it while at that miserable job. It would have helped me to that perfect state of blissful not-caring that I tried so hard to achieve. For someone who is passionate about what they do, is professional, wants to accomplish something in life (besides kissing someone's a**), this book also helps you realize that unless you want to live in that state, maybe Corporate America isn't for you. The book also reveals exactly what is wrong with the state of corporations today--they are run by big fat egos-- that are truly overpaid, get bonuses for losing money, and don't go to jail even when they steal from their own employees. So thank you Stanley Bing for your clever insights and reinforcing my decision. Keep 'em coming.