Throwing the Elephant : Zen and the Art of Managing Up

Sit down. Breathe deep. This is the last business book you will ever need. For in these pages, Stanley Bing solves the ultimate problem of your working life: How to manage the boss.

The technique is simple . . . as simple as throwing an elephant. All it takes is the proper state of mind, a step-by-step plan, and a great leap of faith. This humble guide provides all these and more. It is Zen that enables one to take an object of enormous weight and size and mold it in one's grasp like a ball of Silly Putty. For senior management, in truth, is the silliest putty of them all.

This comprehensive course walks budding business bodhisattvas through basic skills needed to provide the simple elephant handling that makes everyday life possible, including but not limited to the primary task of following along after the elephant with a little broom and dustpan.Serious students will then move to intermediate steps, from Polishing the Elephant's Tusks to Hiding from the Elephant When It Has Been Drinking and Feels Quite Nasty. Beyond this level lies the land of the practiced Zen masters, culminating in the ability to leverage and then throw the now-weightless elephant--and even play catch with it at corporate retreats.

If What Would Machiavelli Would Do? was the meanest business book since the Renaissance, Throwing the Elephant provides the yang to that yin. Because sometimes you've got to be selfless, compassionate, and completely empty to get the job done.

Amazon.com Review
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

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great read, 2009-07-13
This book was worth the money for sure!! Awesome read and inspirational. Helps you get focused on what really matters in life.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Such an original book!, 2009-01-31
What a great and original writer Stanley Bing is! The book was so clever, so right on, so insightful, so fun...and more. Thank you Stanley for your wonderful book!


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Zenfully Funny, 2008-06-29
This book is a humorous look at how to deal with the Big Boss. Unfortunately, the many truths that lie beneath the humor, also make it a bit sad.

Stanley Bing, the Budha, walks the reader through all aspect of the Zen art of elephant handling. It starts with the foundation, exposing truths (e.g. Work is suffering. Desire is the root of suffering. There are no truths! - You get the idea). Then he charts the path to enlightenment.

Like mastery of any skill, it takes time and it is best to start with simple lessons such as how to greet the elephant, feed it, and follow after it with a broom and shovel. The lessons get more complicated with topics like shining its belly with appreciation, obeying and disobeying, helping it make up its mind, convincing it every idea is its own, etc. It culminates with the final lesson and the title of the book, throwing the elephant.

The book is laugh out loud funny at times. The author is extremely clever. At 200+ pages, it probably would have been even more effective if shorter.

If you find you are taking your job or yourself too seriously this book will quickly break you out of that funk.

-- Nick McCormick, Author, Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good Manager


0 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

STILL HAVE NOT RECEIVED the book, 2007-07-09
Please assist me as I still have not received this book and this is the second time I have placed the order and the money has been debited from my account.



2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Working for Peanuts is all very fine!, 2005-10-21
No really, I mean it.

Or anyway, it will be, once you calm yourself, little aphid, and penetrate to the heart of "Throwing the Elephant", Zen Master Stanley Bing's exegesis on the sublime art of applying the infinite wisdom of Siddhartha himself to the sinews, guts, entrails and viscera of the business jungle, and mastering the King of the Beasts himself.

No, silly, not the Lion. The Elephant.

You don't know about the Elephant in the room? Sure you do.

Let's step back a moment: let's meditate. Calm. Relax. Get in touch with the great infinite blackness of stars and even more stars wheeling and dancing and colliding above us and about us, and what the Hell, after a few vodka gimlets down at Dorsia, maybe even *through* us.

Did you know see that star overhead? See how it twinkles? Now imagine: the light from that star has taken thousands, perhaps millions of light-years to travel from Constellation Seti Prime, which means that by the time we see it twinkle, the star itself may very well have exploded. Or subsided into the stellar senesence of a red dwarf. That is to say, that star you're wishing upon may already be long dead.

Kinda puts the McGillicuddy Account in perspective, huh?

I could end this review with that, but I'll proceed a bit further: sit beneath the bodhi tree with Zen Master Bing. He'll teach you about the Elephant. He'll teach you about the Great Nothingness which flows around and through you. He'll teach you, as Sidhartha taught him, that desire is suffering, that there is only the dharma, and at its heart, Duty.

Duty? Why yes: to serve and keep and feed and groom and care for the Elephant. To not annoy it. To console it when it is sad, and galumph about with it (beware the feet!) when it is joyous. To sweep up its poop, and to clean off its poopy hindquarters. To leash it, to ride it, and ultimately, to throw it.

But let's talk, quickly, about the Elephant. All offices have one, perhaps a few. The Elephant has its pen in one of the corners of the executive suite: good digs, maybe even a working fireplace up here on the 37th floor, possibly a wet bar, maybe even an in-house masseuse.

Can you smell the sweet rotten reek of straw and sweat and blood and tears and dung? Yep, the Elephant. It will sally forth, to trumpet and do other bellicose things in the jungle: the lowly creatures in its vicinity (hint: you) will keep their heads down, fall silent, try not to make sudden moves or loud noises.

The Elephant will make you fear for your career, your home, your wife, your small children, your very life. It will make you work over the weekend, or cut short the long-planned trip to Bermuda. It will force you to work long hours and give lots of face time.

Ah, yes: now there is recognition. The Elephant.

So with that, then, this quick little primer---Bing the Bhodissatva practically puts the KO in Koan---will teach you how to abide, control, and ultimately master this fell beast, without being stamped to jelly. And it's a tasty little read, that goes down like cucumber paste. How cool is that?

As the Buddha himself once said, as he sat beneath his bhodi tree: Very.

JSG

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