Gil Schwartz
Stanley Bing is the pen name of Gil Schwartz, a business humorist. His work is similar to Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoons. He has written a column for Fortune (magazine) magazine for twenty years, and has written many books.
Schwartz is a public relations executive for CBS. He pretends this is a secret.
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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 book. In a few years, he had moved to the front of the book 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 90s.
His first book was a small Devil's Dictionary of business terms called Bizwords. Crazy Bosses, a somewhat overly scholarly exercise that nevertheless established the early groundwork of his subsequent career, was published in 1990. It was at this point that Bing, who had been writing in secret within a large and rather humorless multinational conglomerate, revealed his existence to his colleagues at Westinghouse, who had heretofore known him only by his given name. Interestingly, these conservative citizens were thrilled to have Bing in their midst, and immediately felt better about Schwartz, his given name. In the years to come, Bing continued to appear as Schwartz in business settings, but published only under his own name. A series of best-selling business books appeared, including the evergreen 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. Bing is also the author of two novels, Lloyd: What Happened, a tragic comedy that introduced extensive business graphics into the novel for the first time, and You Look Nice Today," a comic tragedy.
In January of 1996, a fatuous, drunken journalist who had happened to work with Bing at Esquire decided to share what had been a closely held secret since 1984 with a mean-spirited reporter from the New York Times. And so it was that on a Monday morning, as a blizzard hit New York, the Times published a breathless article revealing that Bing was actually Schwartz, who worked for a big media company. The Times reporter, who has since been exiled to Asia in an unrelated development, attempted to raise issues of propriety about Bing and his alter-ego, but was unsuccessful. Amusing reactions came from John Huey, then editor of FORTUNE, and Michael Jordan, head of CBS who, when asked about Bing, referred the matter to Schwartz. Since that first outing, Bing has repeatedly been dramatically revealed as if it had never been done before each time he emerges to publicize a book. He is possibly the only author who has ever been so aggressively and pervasively denied the anonymity afforded by a pseudonym. Even on Amazon, his books are sometimes listed as having been partially written by Schwartz.
Today, Stanley Bing continues to write the back page for FORTUNE Magazine, delivering bi-weekly 950-word nuggets of satire and strategy, while Schwartz holds down a similar post at Men's Health, writing a 2500 word column that is vaguely reminiscent of his earlier work at Esquire. He remains a senior executive in the corporation he joined in 1982.