Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up – A Wickedly Funny Survival Guide for Stressed Employees and Difficult Bosses

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, the alter ego of Gil Schwartz (1951–2020), was the bestselling author of Crazy Bosses, What Would Machiavelli Do?, Throwing the Elephant, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, 100 Bullshit Jobs . . . And How to Get Them, The Big Bing, and The Curriculum, as well as the novels Lloyd: What Happened, You Look Nice Today, and Immortal Life. He was a top CBS communications executive whose identity was one of the worst-kept secrets in business.