A humorous look at the 5 faces of the crazy boss

CRAZY BOSSES: Spotting them, serving them, surviving them, by Stanley Bing, Morrow, 271 pages, $20.

If you are a subscriber to Esquire magazine you know Stanley Bing (not his real name, I now learn) as the author of the witty and thought-provoking “Executive Summary” column that details such challenges of corporate management as the pitfalls of the three-martini lunch.

Bing fans forced to wait a month between fixes have something with which to satiate their appetites in “Crazy Bosses.” Bing in a book does not disappoint — not when he examines the five faces of the Crazy Boss: the Vicious Bully, the Sniveling Paranoid, the Self-Obsessed Narcissist, the Alternating Fascist-Wimp Bureaucrazy, and the Chronic Disaster Hunter.

Do not be put off by the title. This is no boring treatise on executive management turned out by some Harvard MBA to impress his peers down at the local yacht club.

Quite the contrary. Under the skillful hand of the acerbic Bing, who employs hilarious case histories to document his thesis, the reader can joyfully relate to the subject at hand.

Always eager to perform a vital service for his constituents, the author offers practical solutions to the problems of the workplace experienced by commoners who labor under siege for managerial monsters.

In a chapter dealing with the Viscious Bully, Bing points out that management by terror is a time-honored technique, because it works. “The most mediocre man or woman can suddenly seem dynamic, forceful, fearful — passing anxiety and hatred down the managerial pipe until it infects all who work under him. … American management is replete with admiration of classic bullies who, as long as they flourish, are left to operate pretty much as they will.”

OK. But how is a lowly serf to thwart the species?

Funny you should ask.

At the conclusion of each chapter describing the Five Crazies, Bing offers “action points,” short-term strategies one might implement in the interest of survival:

Be ostentatiously loyal but don’t toady — “never allow general, pleasant sucking up to degenerate into fawning slavishness.” Also, provide life assistance when you can; stay out of striking distance; show a little muscle now and then; make friends — you’ll need them; nip the small ones in the bud, while they are still tiny bullies bullying tiny people.

Finally, keep on hating. “As hard as it may be to keep the fires burning, never let them smolder and die out. … Remember the basic tenet of all crazy-boss relations: He can only own your soul if you give it to him. Don’t.”

Sound advice from a man who knows whence he speaks, since in real life he is an executive — though an anonymous one — with what the book jacket describes as “a large, multinational conglomerate he will under no circumstances divulge.”

And with good reason. Who knows what all-powerful Sniveling Paranoid lurks just around the secretarial pool waiting to make executive dogmeat of such a brave pioneer?

Kent Ward is a free-lance writer who lives in Winterport.