- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Crown Pub (April 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0517703491
- ISBN-13: 978-0517703496
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,036,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
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. He's married, a little chunky, well into the mid-six
figures, which sounds great but means only that he has to work harder every day just to stay where he is. He can see through the corporate veil of stupidity and brutality when he wants to, which is not very often. He loves his wife and children and, suddenly, a senior financial officer named Mona.
Reeling toward the millennium in the era of gross, global consolidation, the corporation is on the verge of launching the most audacious transaction in the history of capitalism. They call it Moby Deal, and Lloyd is put in charge of making it all happen, a mandate he receives early one morning through the miasma of a let-me-die-now hangover. The good news is that Lloyd is perfectly suited to the task: he looks okay in a suit, can drink or eat just about anything that's put in front of him, and has a strong value system that has never stopped him from accomplishing any assigned duty.
Can Lloyd achieve Productivity? Can he get lean without being mean? Can he inspire increasingly greater numbers of people to do more for less while he himself does less for more? Can he gain the world without losing his soul? Can he keep his hands off a valued and extremely attractive associate?
Lloyd: What Happened is brilliantly and comically annotated with color bar graphs, pie charts, diagrams, and illustrated flourishes. It is the iconographic equivalent of an illuminated manuscript for the modern world, with a story that will make readers laugh out loud and cringe with recognition of every character and situation. Bing is a master storyteller and has written what is sure to be a classic of our time.
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. He's married, a little chunky, well into the mid-six
figures, which sounds great but means only that he has to work harder every day just to stay where he is. He can see through the corporate veil of stupidity and brutality when he wants to, which is not very often. He loves his wife and children and, suddenly, a senior financial officer named Mona.
Reeling toward the millennium in the era of gross, global consolidation, the corporation is on the verge of launching the most audacious transaction in the history of capitalism. They call it Moby Deal, and Lloyd is put in charge of making it all happen, a mandate he receives early one morning through the miasma of a let-me-die-now hangover. The good news is that Lloyd is perfectly suited to the task: he looks okay in a suit, can drink or eat just about anything that's put in front of him, and has a strong value system that has never stopped him from accomplishing any assigned duty.
Can Lloyd achieve Productivity? Can he get lean without being mean? Can he inspire increasingly greater numbers of people to do more for less while he himself does less for more? Can he gain the world without losing his soul? Can he keep his hands off a valued and extremely attractive associate?
Lloyd: What Happened is brilliantly and comically annotated with color bar graphs, pie charts, diagrams, and illustrated flourishes. It is the iconographic equivalent of an illuminated manuscript for the modern world, with a story that will make readers laugh out loud and cringe with recognition of every character and situation. Bing is a master storyteller and has written what is sure to be a classic of our time.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Mick Jagger once said that the hardest part of writing a rock & roll song was ending it. That's why many just fade out. Pity Bing couldn't just have faded out this otherwise delightful tale of corporate America - a sort of "Babbitt" of the late 20th century. The ending is horribly contrived and mars the work. Stop at the last chapter but one, and this book deserves the full five stars.
Format:Hardcover
Mick Jagger once said that the hardest part of writing a rock & roll song was ending it. That's why many just fade out. Pity Bing couldn't just have faded out this otherwise delightful tale of corporate America - a sort of "Babbitt" of the late 20th century. The ending is horribly contrived and mars the work. Stop at the last chapter but one, and this book deserves the full five stars.
Format:Hardcover
I love Stanley Bing's columns in Fortune but couldn't finish this awful book. Rather, I finished it where he should have.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Insightful and humorous
A brilliant book taken down a peg by the weak ending. Funny but painful.
Published on 7 May 1999
SATIRE OR REALITY?
"LLOYD: WHAT HAPPENED" IS BILLED AS A FICTIONAL SATIRE OF THE CORPORATE WORLD IN THE 90'S. THIS IS JUST A RUSE TO AVOID LAWSUITS. Read more
Published on 7 April 1999
Hilarious
Loads of fun. Somewhere between a cartoon series and a novel.
Published on 8 Dec 1998
Very Funny, clever business novel, but...
This is a very funny comic book of a novel, complete with hysterical charts and graphs of the characters high and low points. Read more
Published on 6 July 1998
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... Read more
Published on 23 Jun 1998
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... Read more
Published on 19 Jun 1998
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... Read more
Published on 1 Jun 1998
A must read!
I couldn't stop reading it - I just had to know what would happen next. Too often, unfortunately, I felt as if I had been through many (although certainly not all) of Lloyd's... Read more
Published on 4 May 1998
Very funny read. Benchley meets DeVries. With bar charts!
It's not often I read a 400-page book in less than 24 hours, but I couldn't wait to find out what crazy thing was going to happen next. Read more
Published on 29 April 1998
Pointless
The author spends to much time on telling us about Lloyds family, shopping trips and his affair. Some of this book is funny but most of it is boring and it lacks any kind of... Read more
Published on 22 April 1998
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