The Big Bing

Stanley Bing

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061739071
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The definitive collection of thoughts, assaults, and hilarious observations from America's premier business humorist and bestselling author of Throwing the Elephant and What Would Machiavelli Do?

The Big Bing will be a mandatory addition to the library of everyone who works for a living, or would like to. For nearly 20 years, Stanley Bing's funny, wise, pleasantly mean-spirited, and at times even useful columns have delighted readers in the pages of Esquire, Fortune and a variety of other national publications.

Bing has lived the last two decades inside the belly of the corporate beast, clawing his way to the top of one of the great multinational companies in the cosmos. And he has seen it all: the high body count after many a gruesome deal, the machine that grinds up the bones of those who stood in its way, the birth and death of executive dinosaurs (and he's had quite a few lunches with some of them, too). The result is storytelling at its best—sophisticated, amusing, and driven by the kind of insight that only a true insider can possess.

The Big Bing provides a mole's-eye-view of the society in which we all live and work, creating one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking, and just plain funny bodies of work in contemporary letters.

You have to walk before you can run. Then later, when you’re running, you need more sophisticated guidance, because doing a bunch of important things while running isn’t all that easy.

In the beginning, as opposed to now, I really didn’t know what I was doing. So the first things I looked at were overall strategies to very simple things that turned out to be a lot harder than they looked. Giving good phone. Taking lunch with distinction. Considering how to tackle the everyday tactical challenges that, taken together, could help define a career.

No issue was too small. Back at the start, for instance, before I got my wind going, I got tired in the afternoons and very often wanted a nap. It took me a while to work out a strategy to get one in without getting egregiously busted. Finally, I did it. First, I never took a nap through a phone call. If the phone rang on my desk, I woke and answered it. That was rule one. Second, I decided one day to sleep on the floor with my head against the door. That way if somebody came in without knocking, the door would hit me on the head and wake me. If asked, I could say I was doing my back exercises. Nobody wants to rag on a guy with a bad back. So that was my nap strategy. And it worked.

Other strategies followed about increasingly complex issues. It has turned out, in the end, that the need to think about the nuts and bolts never goes away. At every point of a working career, the issue of How must be managed—and the 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, no matter how low-down you are on the food chain, on the same footing as the pasty executives who make nothing but decisions and money all day.

In the beginning, there was my turf. And I beheld it, and it was very tiny. There were more of us then, back when the corporation was young and centralized. The landscape swarmed with associates and directors and vice presidents so numerous that, when they massed, the hillside hummed for miles around. Each of us tended his proud little patch of duties, met with pals around the watering hole at sundown, and, for the most part, coveted not his neighbor’s ass. Then the plague of merger fell upon our house, and many good folk were swept away. Vast tracts lay ripe for conquest, and we who survived took pretty much what we wanted. Before long I found myself steward of quite a nice chunk of real estate, with nary a shot fired in anger.

Then came the post-Armageddon wasteland that is now upon us. Where before there was me and Chuck and Ted and Fred and Phyllis and Janice and Lenny, now there’s simply me and Lenny. And Lenny, I’m sorry to say, is a classic turf-fresser, slavering on mine while he gibbers possessively over his own. I come in some mornings to find him squatting with a disingenuous expression in what used to be my backyard. “You’ve soaked up a lot of turf that used to be mine, Len,” I told him recently over a morning cup of coffee. “If you want war, it’s okay by me, but I warn you—I won’t lose.” Since then, Lenny and I have enjoyed a nice sense of collegiality. We even have a chat once every couple of days about what we’re up to, more or less. But I’m not fooled. Hitler didn’t stop at Prague when the tasty little Balkans lay at his feet, and Lenny won’t either.

Turf is the work that no one but you should be doing. But it’s more. It’s the proprietary relationships you have with people—the human glue that holds your career together. Like all great things in life, it’s most important to those who don’t get much. “If you’re secure in your job, and you have a well-defined position with a lot of responsibility, turf doesn’t become that big an issue,” says my friend Steve, senior manager at a publishing company. Good attitude, when all that’s challenged is your right to fund an opinion survey or something. But there are times when something more fundamental is threatened. Keep the following in mind:

Try not to act like a thumb-sucking worm. A lot of very uptight people are drawn to the world of business, who knows why. But few are as minimal as those who scrab around clutching worthless sod to their bosoms. I’ve seen guys haggle over who has the duty, nay, the honor, of ordering the chairman’s muffin. “Real turf is something you have an emotional investment in,” says a young powermeister I know, “that, if you lost it, would take away a real part of you.” So take what you need and leave the rest.

The turf you make is equal to the bows you take. Recognition begets turf. When I was a new recruit, I was given the chore of assembling the department’s monthly reports to the chairman. This gently bubbling pot of self-aggrandizement was routinely signed by my erstwhile vice president. As a neophyte in the business world, it never occurred to me that my work should be attributed to someone else. It was three months before Chuck, in a spasm of assiduity, perused my output and noticed my name, not his, affixed to the title page. By then it was impossible for him to re-create the fiction that he was solely responsible. Thus did I attain my first visible piece of soil.

Greed conquers nothing. Those who live by the slice-and-run will die by it. “Nobody likes to see turf-grabbing in other people,” says my pal Stu, a financial analyst. “That person generally ends up getting bounced as a threat to everyone.” This, of course, doesn’t mean renouncing new vistas. “You have to acquire small parcels legitimately, one by one, without people realizing what you’re doing,” he suggests. “Get ten things of that size, and you’ve got a lot. Then one day people turn around and say, ‘Look, he’s in charge of all this great stuff. He must be more important than we thought.’ “

Good electric fences make good neighbors. My friend Rick was given the job of writing and editing his company’s strategic plan. Like a generous fellow, he invited a slightly senior peer to chip in. “I was usurped,” he says now. “Because of his title, he ended up making the decisions on everything, and I became the flunky. I finally decided I didn’t care. And then I left.” But Rick’s problems might well have been solved with a Wagnerian display of temper. Authority is invested from above. It comes with the right to tell anyone, within reason, as politely as necessary, to get bent.

Let ‘em eat dirt. “My magazine got a new staff, and the people I liked quit, and all these young turks came in,” my friend Louise recounts. “And Peter, the new editor, started, little by little, taking away responsibilities over and above my daily duties. I had always been included in management meetings, for instance, and suddenly I wasn’t. Then a friendly colleague called and told me I was going to lose my job. He suggested I call a friend of his at a very big paper and offer to write for him the same columns I was doing at the magazine. So I called the newspaper editor and he thought it was a great idea.

“I quit in a really great and grandiose way,” she grins. “I was responsible for a huge number of listings—not to mention two columns. I acted like everything was fine, but every day I secretly took home one or two files until my drawers were empty. I waited until the time of the month when all my work would be due. Then I walked in and said to Peter, ‘I quit right now.’ I left that morning. It really screwed them. It was great.”

Yes, indeed. Turf is you, and they can’t take that away.

1986

I’ve been one of the lucky ones, I guess. From the day I mumbled in off the street in my best brown suit, I was given the basics—a door, a phone, and a desk capacious enough to hide a multitude of sins. After surviving my first putsch, I moved up fifty floors, kept my door, and inherited my squawk box. It took my former field marshal’s precipitate demise, however, to give me a hammerlock on the ridiculous space I now enjoy. You should see it. A wall of windows that makes consultants gasp. Walnut galore, a spate of comfy chairs, some tasty greenery, and yes, a TV. People who enter this office think they’re dealing with a guy who knows what he’s talking about, even when I don’t. That’s a big plus. But I’m not satisfied. There’s a little spot right down the hall from the executive washroom I’ve got my eye on. It’s smaller, but it’s three floors up. Success, like hot air, rises.

Your office is the outward expression of your power. It’s also your home for fully one half of your adult life. In its confines, you preside over meetings of your making, inhale a noontime pasta salad in relative sanity, catch a snooze, sign papers, talk to wives and lovers, read, think, live. As your center of operations, it’s the one place where you should reign in supreme comfort and style. “Your office should increase your sense of self,” says a friend who manages a staff of thirty. “The more it expresses who you are, the more powerful it can be for you.” In short, if you don’t love your office, you’ve got trouble. You can’t put your feet on another guy’s desk.

Following are some of the tools you can use to feel at home on the range.

Quality Location. Each company has its own notion of where the action is. The point is to be there. “I know a guy who actually refused a corner office because it would have moved him farther away from the CEO,” says my friend Doug, a corporate attorney. “The Chief is an old guy who doesn’t have the energy to walk too far. He shuffles out of his office twice a day and this guy is right in his face. That’s shrewd.” As always, out of sight means out of mind, especially when the mind in question has a ten-second attention span.

Quality Size. Commanding officers don’t work in pup tents. “You have to have a place big enough to make people comfortable,” says Ralph, an investment banker. “You invite them into your lair, and you’ve got them in your clutches, and then they have to deal with your power.” So watch for vacancies—they arise as colleagues inevitably fall—and militate constantly for a room befitting a guy as big as you’d like to appear.

Quality Furniture. The desk, of course, is your single most important piece of hardware, and it should have the breadth and depth to contain your unlimited vision and garbage. Beyond it, however, lie the ancillary pieces that surround and augment your status: bookshelf, conference table, couch, and, naturally, your credenza.¹

“I made them buy me what’s called an ergonomic chair,” brags my pal Saul, bean counter at a brokerage. “Aside from the fact that it’s good for my back, I can raise or lower it according to the message I want to send out. When I want to get down and be folksy, I ease it to the lowest level. When I want to intimidate, I crank it up as high as it goes. I started doing this instinctively, but then I noticed it seemed to work.”

Quality Chotchkes. Got a toy train you like? A rubber ducky? Plunk it on your blotter and stand back. “People read people’s offices, and it’s not bad to decorate yours with warmth and a sense of humor,” says my pal Eddie, V.P. in a cubicle-infested publishing company. “I have a couple of Peanuts cartoons, some miniature blue mittens, a pen that looks like a head of broccoli, and a framed news clipping that says, I Met Satan Face-to-Face.” He adds that such geegaws provide a lot more than a source of pre-meeting yuks. “They remind me that some more essential part of myself is still alive here,” he says wistfully.

Quality Perks. Consider these your right as a heavy hitter. They may, in fact, help take the place of more substantive amenities. “When I was promoted a few years back, I said there was one thing I wanted in my new office,” my buddy Don, a senior copywriter, recalls. “They were expecting me to say a window, or a coffee table, but I said, ‘I deal with a lot of parched writers. I want a refrigerator so I can keep a couple of beers in my office.’ I felt it would lend a certain bonhomie to the proceedings.” And it did, too. “I know people were impressed,” he recalls. “They didn’t say, ‘Hey Don, what a lavish office’; they said, ‘Wow! A refrigerator!’ “ Today Don enjoys a more elevated position at another firm, but his memories of the treasure perk are undimmed. “Believe me,” he says, “I remember that refrigerator better than I remember that job.”

And Last and Foremost. “The key element is a door. Screw the windows and everything else,” states my friend Arnold from behind his. “A closed door defines your space as yours, as opposed to something public. And that ties into the notion of privacy. I have a real strong sense that there’s no power unless there’s privacy.”

I guess my friend Rick would agree. “I lost my goddamn job because I didn’t have a door,” he mutters. “I was on the phone to somebody and I said, ‘I can’t see you Friday because I’m going to call in sick and take a day off.’ My Nazi boss, who hated me already, happened to be lurking in the vicinity and heard me. And decided to trap me.” To his credit, Rick did indeed get sick on the day in question, even going so far as to visit a doctor. This did not prevent him, unfortunately, from taking a short trip to Washington anyhow. “I came back on Monday morning and my boss confronted me,” he continues. “He said, ‘I called you Friday. You weren’t home. You’re fired.’ “

With pain and humiliation has come a greater understanding. “I’d say either a door or the ability to whisper is an absolute necessity,” he now believes.

Of the two, I’d take the former. A job that can’t be abused is scarcely worth having.

1986

Just because a guy is issued the proper equipment doesn’t mean he knows what to do with it. That’s why I’ve always been in awe of Brewster, my counterpart at the Great and Terrible Parent. He’s nothing much in person, but with a deft gray touch, he works a telephone the way the Ayatollah worked Ollie North. When Brewster talks, I attend, not to the words exactly, but to the precious burble that at any moment may rise to the surface.

About a year ago, he rings me up for no apparent reason. His tone is unhurried to the point of entropy, but I don’t push him. “Well, gotta get going,” he chortled at last, which I know signals the onset of our true conversation. Sure enough: “One last thing,” he slips oh so nonchalantly. “Are you guys ready for the divestiture of your metal-flange division? Because I hear that’s coming down by the end of the quarter. See ya.”

Now that’s exactly the kind of information I like to get ahold of in advance, so I guess it’s no wonder I consider my spot in Brewster’s Rolodex to be a magnatory asset—the guy can get more done over the electronic ear than most of us can accomplish in a month of meetings, and more discreetly, too. When you hang up from a chat with Brewster, you know you’ve gotten phone and gotten it good.

Aside from the credit card, the phone is the ultimate business tool. It eliminates the need for meets with unnecessary people, enables you to pollinate myriad flowers while brown-bagging it at your desk, and slices odious paper flow. As with any instrument, mastery takes talent, practice, and finally, a sense of abandon that transcends technique. “The trick is to do it like sex,” rants my pal Marty, a student of the medium. “You’ve got to get down with the person you’re calling, to tease, cajole, but at all times to have your low goal in the front of your mind. And when the schmoozing gets old—cut to the chase!”

Following are some thoughts to keep in mind:

Hardware Counts. Love your implement. “Phones are my life, so I put a lot of effort in selecting a user-friendly machine that will encourage ridiculously long talks,” says my friend Rick, a consultant. “You have to be able to use your hands without bending your head at a crazy angle and scrunching your shoulders,” he specifies. This may be tough in an era of wafer-thin receivers straight out of Star Trek, but fight for comfort, even if it means demanding those puffy shoulder guards or some such. It’s your neck.

Can You Answer Like a Human Being? A friend who hates dealing with supplicants has an endearing way of answering her phone. “Yes,” she states, in an ill-tempered grumble that would curdle Noxema. For anyone not dodging PR people, simple statement of your name should get things off right. “Omnicrude Industries, Department of Mercenary Services, John Rambo speaking” is just pompous. Folks want to speak with you, not your résumé.

Baby, It’s You. Good phone fabricates the illusion of kinship. “When I first got to the city, I had the privilege of watching this high-class publicist work the phones,” says my friend Bret, editorial-services V.P. whose own chops are legendary. “He talked to fifteen people in fifteen minutes, and they were all suddenly his buddies. He sort of ripped the desk away from them and made them feel like they were standing before him as people, without their title and symbols of power.”

We’re Talking Insecurity Here? You got it. “I find it much easier to lie through my teeth as a disembodied voice,” says my friend Eileen, an entrepreneur who stomachs about a dozen callers before breakfast. “Sometimes I think I’m so good at it I’m going to burn in hell,” she preens. A little bogus sexuality also adds yeast to the mix. “I’m completely Suzy Creamcheese,” she reports. “You can establish this flirtatious relationship over the phone, which, maybe because you’ve never met and never will, is very, very satisfying.”

Dial Your Own! It’s impressive when a big caballero places his personal calls, but runners in the humility sweepstakes are rare. More common are self-important putzes who have their secretaries do the dialing. “Please hold for Mr. Blah,” they whine and promptly leave you in telephone hell. My friend Sol, a busy editor, has a simple solu...