Look Out! It's the Crazy Bosses Podcast

The Zorro of Corporate Communication is back. Watch out you profit mongering psychopaths. It's Fortune Magazine columnist ... Stanley Bing!

Stanley Bing

The Bully. The Paranoid. The Narcissist. The Wimp. The Disaster Hunter. Stanley Bing dissects them all, and reveals the level of contagion each form of craziness carries.

Last year, in Rome, Inc., The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation, Stanley Bing told the story of a family business that prospered through a series of brutal consolidations and rational growth. Then senseless internal conflicts lead to a long line of demented CEOs, monumental expansion, and foolish diversification - at a high cost in shattered lives. The most brilliant of the Roman executives, Julius Caesar, invented the comb-over, according to Bing.

In the end, a series of reverse takeovers leaves the once-proud but now overextended and corrupt parent company at the mercy of less-civilized operations that previously cringed at the grandeur of the corporate brand. Great material for Hollywood epics, The Roman Empire had one hell of a run. But, as with most organizations lead by psychopaths, (Enron, WorldCom come to mind), it came to a rather messy end.

In Stanley's new book (actually, an old book, he first wrote Crazy Bosses 15 years ago), "but I was so boring and pedantic! So... jejune. I read it now and I cringe," he says. So he re-wrote it. Of course, looking over the past decade, there's a whole new batch of crazy bosses to profile. About Bill Gates, Bing writes; "Now in the process of mutating into post-executive Yoda status." Peter Clayton interviewed Stanley in New York.

Stanley's Bio:
Stanley Bing is a columnist for Fortune magazine and the best-selling author of What Would Machiavelli Do?, Throwing the Elephant, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, 100 Bullshit Jobs and How to Get Them, and The Big Bing, as well the novels Lloyd: What Happened and You Look Nice Today. By day, he is an haute executive in a gigantic multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst-kept secrets in business.

Since the latter part of the century just past, Stanley Bing has been exploring the relationship between authority and madness. In one bestselling book after another, reporting from his hot-seat as an insider in a world-renowned multinational corporation, he has tried to understand the inner workings of those who lead us and to inquire why they seem to be powered, much of the time, by demons that make them obnoxious and dangerous, even to themselves.

In What Would Machiavelli Do?, Bing looked at the issue of why mean people do better than nice people, and found that in their particular form of insanity lay incredible power. In Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up, he offered a spiritual path toward managing the unruly executive beast. And in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, he taught us how to become one of them, and wage war on the playing field that ends in a dream home in Cabo. Now he returns to his roots to offer the last word on the entity that shapes our lives and stomps through—and on—our dreams: The Crazy Boss.


Students of Bing—and there are many, secreted inside tortured organizations, yearning for blunt instruments with which to fight—will note that he has walked this ground before, looking for answers. In 1992, he published the first edition of Crazy Bosses, which was fine, as far as it went. Now, some 15 years and several dozen insane bosses later, he has updated and rethought much of the work. Back in the last century, Bing was a small, trembling creature, looking up at those who made his life miserable and analyzing the mental illness that gave them their power. Today, while still trembling much of the time, he is in fact one of those people his prior work has warned us against. His own hard-won wisdom and now institutionalized dementia make this new edition completely fresh and indispensable to anyone who works for somebody else or lives with somebody else, or would like to.

In short, Bing is back on his home turf in this funny, true, and essential book, peering with his keen and frosty eye at the crazy boss in all his guises: the Bully, the Paranoid, the Narcissist, the Wimp, and the self-destructive Disaster Hunter. If you loved the original, classic Crazy Bosses, you'll be thrilled to plunge back into the new, refurbished pool. If you are new to the book, strap yourself in: it's going to be a crazy ride.

---