People in the high flush of a successful but sometimes frenetic business career often look with envy at those who have entered their golden years. Ah! they think. To be retired! Free to wake when you wish, to have the time to reflect on the deeper things in life, play golf or quoits, or just go fishin’ in the middle of the day. The stressed-out mind boggles at the prospect, and the lip cannot help but tremble and drool.

At the same time, you may not be emotionally–or financially–ready to hang it all up. Which is why, whether you’re a withered graybeard or a teeny young future hotshot in leather jodhpurs, you need Stanley Bing’s global positioning system for a sane and pleasantly successful life: Executricks, or How to Retire While You’re Still Working.

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Since the latter part of the century just past, Stanley Bing has been exploring the relationship between authority and madness. In one bestselling book after another, reporting from his hot-seat as an insider in a world-renowned multinational corporation, he has tried to understand the inner workings of those who lead us and to inquire why they seem to be powered, much of the time, by demons that make them obnoxious and dangerous, even to themselves.

In What Would Machiavelli Do?, Bing looked at the issue of why mean people do better than nice people, and found that in their particular form of insanity lay incredible power. In Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up, he offered a spiritual path toward managing the unruly executive beast. And in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, he taught us how to become one of them, and wage war on the playing field that ends in a dream home in Cabo. Now he returns to his roots to offer the last word on the entity that shapes our lives and stomps through—and on—our dreams: The Crazy Boss.

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The scholarly discipline of Bullsh**t Studies has blossomed in the last several years, fertilized by a number of critical works on the subject and the growing importance of the issue across a wide range of professions. Now, best-selling author and lifelong practitioner Stanley Bing enters the field with a comprehensive look at the many attractive jobs now available to those who are serious about their bullsh**t and prepared to dedicate their working life to it.

What, Bing inquires, do a feng shui consultant, new media executive, wine steward, department store greeter, and Vice President of the United States have in common? What, too, are the actual duties performed by a McKinsey consultant? Other than sitting around making people nervous? Could that possibly be his core function? Likewise, what does an aromatherapist actually do, per se? Sniff things and rub them on people, for big fragrant bucks? Is that all?

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The world’s first corporate case study, as only the best-selling Stanley Bing could tell it.

A family business prospers through a series of brutal consolidations and rational growth. Then senseless internal conflicts lead to a long line of demented CEOs, monumental expansion, and foolish diversification—at a high cost in shattered lives. In the end, a series of reverse takeovers leaves the once-proud but now overextended and corrupt parent company at the mercy of less-civilized operations that previously cringed at the grandeur of the corporate brand.

Enron? WorldCom? Try Rome, whose rise and fall carry a moral that lingers to this day for the managers, employees, and students of any global enterprise. Stanley Bing—whose satirical business books are as savagely funny as they are insightful—mingles business parable and cautionary tale into an ingenious, often hilarious new telling of the story of the Roman Empire.

Sun Tzu was a Sissy will teach the reader how to make war, win and enjoy the plunder in the real world, where those who do not kick, gouge and grab are left behind at the table to pay the tab. Every other book on The Art of War bows low to Sun Tzu. We’re going to tell him to get lost and inform our readers how real war is currently conducted on the battlefield of life.

A mandatory addition to the library of everyone who works for a living (or would like to).

For twenty years, Stanley Bing has offered insight, wisdom, and advice from inside the belly of one of the great corporate beasts. In one essential volume, here is all you need to know to master your career, your life, and, when necessary, other weaker life forms.

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What Would Machiavelli Do?

He would feast on other people’s discord

He wouldn’t exactly seek the company of ass-kissers and bimbos, but he wouldn’t reject them out of hand either

He would realize that loving yourself means never having to say you’re sorry

He would kill people, but only if he could feel good about himself afterward

He would establish and maintain a psychotic level of control

He would use other people’s opinions to sell his book!

A funny, transcendently simple, ultra-enlightening and very Zen guide in the model of What Would Machiavelli Do? that helps you to manipulate and control the large, grey behemoths that run the world, otherwise known as your boss.

This book guarantees personal enlightenment while providing literally dozens of helpful specific exercises and solutions to the most common problems of professional life, all in a compact, attractive package that will strain neither budget, mind nor briefcase. No one who works for anyone else should be able to live without it.

Following a brief grounding in the philosophy and practice of Business Buddhism, we are plunged into a series of pithy instructive chapters designed to walk the untutored, desperate employee through a step-by-step program that will result in total control over the elephant boss.

A comprehensive course walks even the most simple-minded through basic skills one needs 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.

Robert Harbert, better known as Harb, is Executive Vice President in Charge of Total Quality. CaroleAnne Winter is the assistant who runs his life. But even Harb can’t ignore that CaroleAnne’s behavior is increasingly peculiar. At the same time, the vagaries of corporate power shift, and suddenly, both Harb and his Total Quality mandate are vulnerable. It’s at this moment that CaroleAnne levels a stunning charge: that she has been the target of an organized campaign of sexual harassment from her first days at the company. The investigation she demands will reach to the highest levels of the corporation—and at its center, she insists, must be the greatest offender of all: Harb.

Stanley Bing’s books include Throwing the Elephant, What Would Machiavelli Do?, and The Big Bing, as well as the novelLloyd: What Happened, which is currently being developed for HBO. A columnist for Fortune, he also works for a huge multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst-kept secrets in business.

Meet Lloyd. Fast-rising executive and dedicated family man. Beautiful, independent wife. Two children. All the toys he could want. And just to keep things from getting too dull, he’s about to explore a highly personal relationship with Mona, the dynamic and lovely Senior Vice President of Finance. Then Lloyd’s boss decides to take over the world, or a large chunk of it.