[.ca] Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up (ISBN 0060934220)

From Amazon.com:
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

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.

My elephant likes to rage and stomp me!:
This is going down as one of my all-time favorite books. I also highly recommend the excellent book on tape version which is read by the very amusing Simon Jones. My employer is a self-made multimillionaire who is a elephant in the truest meaning of the what this book discusses. He will scream and spit in your face while firing off threats of how he wants to kill you if he feels pushed to far. But the man is at his worst (or finest) when he calmly and collectedly confronts someone in his lair and with smirks and onesided logic breaks them down. I have yet to learn to properly handle my elephant and so he repeatedly stomps me as he trumpets his rage. The beast is the master of browbeating. Ironically (At this very moment of my typing this) he has summoned me to his upstairs office for most likely another stomping. This man/elephant has gone decades without someone effectively standing up to him and saying ***&&!!! this is where you get off the bus!! As the old saying goes "absolute power corrupts." I just got back from my meeting with him. I have been granted a reprieve and will supposedly get much better treatment. But is he really trying to "rehabilitate me" or simply fattening me up for the kill later on? A part of me yearns for the axe and freedom. But I have invested so much work into what I have with him and the company. I think he wants to turn me into an elephant "mini-me." He is in my view a generally good & brilliant human being (amazingly) but with a bad side at times the size of the Grand Canyon. The strange thing about my pachyderm is that he wishes to live forever and never have to be laid to rest in an elephant graveyard. To this end he will be frozen at death in the hope of being brought back to stomp and trumpet among the humans and elephants of the future. I hope the denizens of that time will know what they are bargaining for by bringing him back! But perhaps they will teach him the lessons he has not gotten in this segment of his life. I have a fantasy about winning the lottery and becoming his business partner. My dreams of putting him in his place are much stronger than simply being able to go out and buy anything I want, traveling the world or even making love to beautiful women! Best wishes to all potential elephant wranglers out there! You will need it.

Hilarious but not so useful:
I gave this book 3 stars instead of 2 because it really made me laugh. However, if you have been in corporate American for more than 5 years, you probably already know that "elephants" (Sr. Management) are self-centered weirdos, not normal people like you and me. And the best way to get by is to let them be what they are and ensure you simply manage around their craziness. If you are hoping for useful advice, seek elsewhere. For a funny read, enjoy this book.

But first, get a broom and shovel:
The allegory of the herding of the ox appeared in English as long ago as 1934 in Alan Watts's first book: The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East. It has since appeared again and again in the literature of Zen Buddhism, but see especially D. T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism. Here Fortune magazine columnist and sometime corporate cog and very funny guy, Stanley Bing brings us up to date on how the allegory might play out in the corporate structure. Instead of an ox that the boy innocent manages to tame, Bing gives us an elephant. And instead of taming one's inner self (which is the point of the ox herding story) one tames one's boss, who is after all but a dumb animal. However again, and very cleverly, Bing shows us that to tame one's boss or to tame one's self amounts to the same thing. Curious. But true. There is a kind of The Tao of Pooh meets Dilbert and Murphy's Law on the Way to Enlightenment, done up with the kind of side bars and shaded boxes and cute graphics that one finds in computer learning or "Dummie's" guides "feel" to this little gem. The design of the book is gorgeous, and the book itself is small enough even in hardcover to fit into a suit jacket pocket, should the need arise. Bing's "Buddha Bullets" and other asides (scattered throughout) are sometimes funny, sometimes illuminating, and sometimes just plain dumb, but always in the Zen spirit of kicking the Buddha by the side of the road (should you meet him). His "portrait" of the elephant will amuse, delight and find ready acknowledgment by any who have ever served an elephant--powerful, inimitable, crude, primitive and cagey force that the elephant is. Remember, the elephant is BIGGER than you are, so it never hurts to kiss it up, fairly well sums up Bing's deep and strangely moving message. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter from the Ten Ox Herding Paintings to, e.g., The Dhammapada, Groucho Marx, Dan Quayle and various CEOs--not to mention Mary Meeker, The Doors, and Mark Twain--blend together seamlessly so that curiously they become one in their wisdom or ironic lack thereof. On a deeper level the elephant is the corporation itself, at once your master, your mother, your livelihood. Bring that broom and shovel and follow along as you must until, as Bing has it in the last chapter on page 196, you "become proficient in the Zen art of elephant handling." At such time, your heart "drained...of desire," your mind "emptied," you have the elephant on leash, and the elephant knows that is where he belongs (as the boy has the ox by the nose ring). Some might say that the deeper meaning of the ox herding story is it serves as a guide to meditation, the ox being the recalcitrant mind of the boy who becomes a man. And so it is here: and so Bing advises as he ends the book: "sit down and don't think at all." Bottom line: this is a deliciously clever idea beautifully realized.

A book about nothing:
It must have been fun to write this book. It is much better than Mr Bing's What Would Machiavelli Do? There is more humor than knowledge in this one. Even if you are a Bing fan, I would suggest you borrow it from the library.