Lloyd: What Happened: A Novel of Business

by Stanley Bing

Book Overview

Celebrated columnist Stanley Bing is an anthropologist of corporate culture, a satirist of corporate greed, a comedian of the libido. In his remarkable first novel, Lloyd: What Happened, Bing gives us the last word on business in America. Brazenly honest and wildly funny, Lloyd shows us one crucial year in the life of an upwardly mobile executive for whom pain and gain walk hand in hand. Lloyd is a pretty decent guy. He has an assortment of flaws...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517703491
• ISBN13: 9780517703496
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Crown Business
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.6" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

A MUST READ for anyone who aspires to the executive ranks

One of the funniest and most accurate accounts of the banality of executive life. The book begins in an executive retreat in Pittsburgh and ends in the a top-floor penthouse in NY. In one fell swoop, a small team of backbiters constructs and deconstructs "the deal of the century."

Great business novel for the Gen'xer or Boomer

I just graduated from college and wanted some summer reading before I begin work on Wall Street. I was looking for a novel that was business centered, creative, witty, funny, and suspensful and this book delivered all of these qualities. I highly recommend this book to anyone, I found myself unable to put "Lloyd" down for a moment. I can't wait to read the next book that "Stanley Bing" writes.

totally original twistedlook at our lust for love and money

A hilarious but quite frightening (by dint of the author's keen nailing of male motivation and justification) take on the dissociation of our various selves and the bizarre and self-consuming nature of progress. The interweaving of The Big Deal and the petty lives of the characters is superb. It's a great piece of writing. The fact that Lloyd gets away with it and ends up with everything along with the knowledge that it's the coke-snorting, paranoid, soulless, self proclaimed lunatic who will one day be running what is destined to become the world's biggest conglomerate makes you want to laugh out loud and jump out the penthouse window at the same time.

everything the company recruiter never warned you about

As any manager-level person in any large corporation will tell you, it's career suicide to conduct a meeting, or make a presentation at a meeting, without backup in the form of Microsoft Powerpoint graphics. It does not matter that there are many instances where graphics do not help make a point. They're just required. An absence of graphics is interpreted as meaning that there is no value to the information presented. This book constitutes Lloyd's opportunity to explain "what happened." And, being corporate-savvy, Lloyd illustrates his "presentation" to the reader with graphics. It is that kind of insight that makes the book more than just entertainment. It is a disturbingly-accurate look at how the world's most powerful economy conducts its less-publicized activities. And it is very, very funny.

Smart, sharp and hilarious

"Lloyd: What Happened" is a brilliantly arranged novel. Mixed in with the text are various pie charts and slides that lampoon corporate life in all its glory. To say more would spoil the fun. Get a copy and give one to the Gordon Gekko in your life.