STANLEY BING
Columnist
FORTUNE Click to zoom

Stanley Bing claims to have been born in a log cabin behind the Wharton School of Business, but this, like much else about FORTUNE’s pseudonymous columnist, is a fabrication.

Bing first made his appearance in ESQUIRE Magazine in 1983, writing scurrilous things about his employers and those of his friends, and giving strategic advice to those even more befuddled than he. Rather than risk expulsion from his crabby corporate environment, he created a new name under which he could observe and criticize the executive class while at the same time aspiring to its lifestyle. This strategy has to all intents and purposes succeeded, and today Mr. Bing snipes at the hand that feeds him while functioning as an ultra-haute executive vice president at a huge multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst kept secrets in business.

In 1995 Bing moved to FORTUNE Magazine, where he now reports on corporate life twice monthly under the subtle headline BING! His work has also regularly appeared over the years in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, and a host of women’s and computer magazines. He has also appeared as a regular commentator on NPR.

Bing’s most recent books are You Look Nice Today, a novel, and The Big Bing, a book of essays, both published in the fall of 2003. Prior to that, Bing published The National Best Seller Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up. His previous book was the best-selling What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meaness, published by HarperBusiness. Bing has been featured in Time Magazine, Imus in the Morning, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, and many other national programs.

Bing is also the author of the books Bizwords: Power Talk for Fun and Profit; Crazy Bosses: Spotting Them, Serving Them, Surviving Them (to be reissued by HarperCollins in the spring of 2004); and Lloyd: What Happened, a novel with accompanying computer graphics, which was published in hard cover by Crown in 1998 and by Vintage in paperback this past spring. Lloyd tracks one year in the life of a middle manager who, in becoming a very senior officer of his corporation, also becomes sort of a rotten person. It is currently in development for television by Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone.