People in the high flush of a successful but sometimes frenetic business career often look with envy at those who have entered their golden years. Ah! they think. To be retired! Free to wake when you wish, to have the time to reflect on the deeper things in life, play golf or quoits, or just go fishin' in the middle of the day. The stressed-out mind boggles at the prospect, and the lip cannot help but tremble and drool.

At the same time, you may not be emotionally–or financially–ready to hang it all up. Which is why, whether you're a withered graybeard or a teeny young future hotshot in leather jodhpurs, you need Stanley Bing's global positioning system for a sane and pleasantly successful life: Executricks, or How to Retire While You're Still Working.

Bing is the ultimate corporate insider, one who has attained nosebleed altitude and worked long and hard enough to lose his desire to work long and hard enough. Over time, he has watched the power players who have made their jobs into a waking festival of indolence and fun, and gleaned a vast range of executricks they have developed over the years, based around several core concepts:

• Delegation, or getting other people to do the stuff you don't want to
• Absence, or the ability to get "work" done while not being physically on the scene
• Abuse of status
• Acting visionary when confused
• Intense engagement (used only in crisis)

A wellspring of executricks flow from these simple precepts, including:

• The use of the cell phone and BlackBerry to establish a permanent state of simultaneous Omniscience and Not-Presence
• Roping off mealtimes as zones of defensible entitlement
• Travel as an alternative to work
• The art of the nap
• Golf–the ultimate dodge
• Philanthropy and social activism, a pleasant parallel universe

Executricks is the most precious of resources for those who work hard but would rather be hardly working: a secret handbook that lays bare the stratagems of those who have already ascended to the pinnacles of power. No office, home, or backpack should be without a dog-eared copy. Early adopters earn extra points.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't listen to the naysayers!
Comment: I actually am in management and can tell you that Bing hits the nail on the head. In a very entertaining way, he gives great career advice. In fact, some of it helped me understand better the shannigans in my office.

This isn't going to be interesting or helpful to someone who isn't in the corporate world at the level of middle management or above.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Executricks-Real World Business
Comment: This is by far one of my favorite books. I think the overall tone of the book and the effective satire used in the book is amazing. What is amazing is how closely this relates to the business world and how astonishing this hits the mark. It points out the absolute craziness our current state. It also shows how new devices have enabled this "remote work environment", in any system their will be exploitation but this is a "How To Guide" of epic significance.

There are two ways to take this book. From an Entrepreneurs aspect, "Know Thy Enemy" When we look at systems and developing such systems we must learn how to reduce these loopholes. Or Do We? Drawing parallels from the 4 hour work week and the 80/20 principal, is this new work agreement really a bad thing? Wasteful time is not conducive to productivity.

Overall no matter if you are an Entrepreneur, a CEO or a simple employee, this book gives invaluable information on how "Business" really works!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Einsten? This book may be for you
Comment: At some point in my career (it might have been yesterday, a Sunday, as I read this book and contemplated my workaday status), I realized that I was never going to invent flubber, direct "The Dark Knight", or craft a clever and historically-lauded Wall Street bailout plan, all of these having been done and properly credited, and therefore that I would never make Trump-size money. So at that point, probably yesterday as I lay awake after reading this book, I realized that my career goals were beginning to align with Bing's as outlined in this book.

So its subtitle, "How to retire while you're still working", represents to me a realization that at 49, too old to be taught new tricks and too young to actually retire to golf and death, and incapable of any world-changing feats of finance, art, or history, what I really want is to work just enough to sustain a comfortable existence. So, with that realization, "Executricks", despite its too-precious title, is actually a serious career guide to how to manage just enough to look busy and not mess up, delegating work and taking credit where ethically possible, while navigating the necessary communications and image control in today's disconnected work world.

Seriously, while tongue, in cheek, Bing is dispensing good career and business advice here. Following his guidelines on meetings, for example, will lighten everyone's work schedule, improve productivity, and accomplish much greater results than you are probably getting out of your overmeetinged, underworked schedule today. His table listing the six forms of email (p. 38) and how to use them will at least help trim down the deep weeds of wasted email writing, reading, and responding, and in some extreme cases (you know who you are, about to hit send on that 1,000-word profanity-laced rant about why your manager is a knot-headed dolt, in a reply-all with 17 cc's including your knot-headed dolt of a manager, and HIS manager and . . . . ) may be career-saving.

Of course, Bing tells it all with a steady veneer of humor so that the serious advice sneaks into your brain in stealth mode, where it can percolate and do the most good later. Suggestion to managers: buy each of your team members a copy of this book, especially if your team is distributed and relies on conference calls, Blackberries, email, and instant message to be productive.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not what I was looking for......
Comment: Fairly well written. Silly. Entertaining. But not what I was hoping to read when I ordered it. No real meat, or new ideas.
I rated it well b/c it is well written, and I blame myself for not checking deeper to see that it was a humorous book. I was hoping for something similar to 4 Hour Work Week.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for the Lay Man
Comment: I was very happy with the service I received in ordering this book. I was just disappointed after reading it, it wasn't advice for the common worker. This would only apply to those in management positions. It kind of proved the point of how managers do hardly any work and get paid the most.

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