Company Man

By Bill Saporito

FORTUNE columnist Stanley Bing, the pen name of the author of Lloyd: What Happened (Crown; 416 pages; $25.95), has a day job as a manager for a big media company. So unlike most business journalists, he has experience with the kinds of ugly transactions the rest of us merely chronicle.

This is the world that our protagonist, Lloyd, inhabits. "You don't do this deal because it makes sense," says Lloyd's boss, Doug; "you do it because it can be done." This being "A Novel of Business," each chapter follows a month in Lloyd's calendar, with an executive summary for bottom-line-only readers and a wry collection of pictographs and charts, like "Number of Laughs Enjoyed in Lloyd's Corporation As a Function of Profit Growth." Bing's style is highly readable: workers aren't fired, they're "decruited." And he can make the most loathsome corporate lizard amusing.

Yet Lloyd is everything we'd expect him to be: a predictably amoral executive who clings to the upper wrung of the management ladder like a sloth to a tree branch, fighting to protect his slice of generous options and to overindulge in brown liquids, Cuban smokes, aged red meat and not-so-aged women other than his wife.

Although Lloyd's quest can be fun reading, once again, reality has proved the master of fiction. Last week's humongous real-life deals might raise the unemployment rate in three or four cities while making the honchos filthy rich. That makes even Lloyd seem just a little too tame.

--By Bill Saporito