Bingsop's Fables

May 23, 2011
It doesn't take much to spin Aesop's fables into business lessons. The Hare and the Turtle and any number of other tales, though written around the 5th century BCE, can be easily made relevant to today's business world, and Bing thoroughly, humorously modernizes the popular moral lessons into bite-sized anecdotes that are as easy to digest as they are to apply to the workplace. Instead of greedy monkeys, acquisitive crows, or sneaky foxes, Bing offers Publicity-Crazed Moguls, Blabbering Marketing Executives, and the Executive Vice Presidents of Whatever. The morals may not be as uplifting or plainspoken as they once were, but they still carry a zing: "The weak may inherit the earth, but they do very poorly in the workplace"; or "There's no such thing as âtoo paranoid' anymore." Bing (What Would Machiavelli Do?: The Ends Justify the Meanness), a columnist for Fortune magazine, succeeds less in representing women and minorities; there's a glass ceiling evidently even in parables about business. But his latest slim gimmick would make a fine companion to, say, a desktop Dilbert calendar. 35 line drawings.