Stanley Bing

Career

Stanley Bing is a columnist, novelist, and writer of a large body of work dedicated to exploring the relationship between pathology and authority. He first appeared in the pages of Esquire Magazine, writing a one-page column on corporate strategies at the back of the magazine. In a few years, he had moved to the front of the magazine and began to issue a series of 2500-word essays, mostly on business, sometimes not, that are still remembered by many who got their first options in the 1990s.

His first book was a small devil's dictionary of business terms called Bizwords. Crazy Bosses, which established the early groundwork of his subsequent career, was published in 1992. It was at this point that Bing, who had been writing in secret within a large multinational corporation, revealed his existence to his colleagues at Westinghouse, who had heretofore known him only by his given name. In the years to come, Bing continued to appear as Schwartz in business settings, but published primarily under his pseudonym. A series of best-selling business books appeared, including What Would Machiavelli Do?: The Ends Justify The Meanness; Throwing The Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up; Sun Tzu Was A Sissy, and, published simultaneously in the spring of 2006, Rome, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation, and 100 Bullshit Jobs and How To Get Them. In 2007, Bing published a thoroughly revised edition of Crazy Bosses, adding a layer of strategy that did not exist in the earlier edition, and in 2008, Executricks: How to Retire While You're Still Working. In 2011, Bing published Bingsop's Fables, a version of Aesop's Fables applicable to the business world, populated with corporate archetypes including The Stupid Investor, the Miserable Misery Mogul and the Ill-Tempered PR Person. The book was illustrated by Steve Brodner. Bing's most recent volume, published in 2014, is The Curriculum: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master of Business Arts, a 384-page satirical textbook that purportedly provides a complete business education. Illustrated with color PowerPoint graphics, the book includes a core and advanced curriculum, as well as tutorials and electives, with subjects such as "not appearing stupid", "insensitivity training", and "Town Car management". In a March 2014 interview with Fortune magazine, Bing claimed that all of his data came from a think tank he incorporated, The National Association of Serious Studies, which "adheres to the highest standards of Internet journalism."

Bing also writes online. In 2007, he began a daily blog, www.stanleybing.com, which appears on the Fortune website as well as that of its parent, CNNMoney, and currently syndicates his writing and video blogs at The Huffington Post.

Publication of identity

In 1996, Randall Rothenberg, one of Bing's colleagues at Esquire, informed The New York Times that Bing was actually Gil Schwartz, an executive at CBS. The Times published an article under the headline "CBS's Best-Kept Secret (Hint Hint)" revealing Bing's identity and noting that he "would probably have been able to keep his Swiftian alter ego a secret, known only to a small circle of friends and colleagues, had he not been so successful at his day job." In the article, Schwartz neither confirmed nor denied the claim that he was Stanley Bing. However former CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer, who was aware of the ruse, compared Schwartz/Bing to Andy Rooney and David Letterman.

Today, Stanley Bing continues to write the back page for Fortune magazine, while (as Schwartz) holding down a similar post at Men's Health, writing a 2500-word column reminiscent of his earlier work at Esquire.

Published works

Novels

Personal life

Schwartz is married to writer Laura Svienty. They reside in Manhattan and Mill Valley, California.