BAD BOYS LLOYD: WHAT HAPPENED A Novel of Business By Stanley Bing Crown 416pp $25.95 Every tiny cog laboring to turn his tiny gear in some vast corporate machine must occasionally have harbored the same suspicion: that the guys (and sadly, most of them are guys) pulling the levers really don't have a clue. Lloyd: What Happened, billed as ''a novel of business'' by pseudonymous Fortune columnist Stanley Bing, plays directly to that subversive hunch, doing for the corporation what Primary Colors did for politics. The only difference between the executives who run the show at the huge unnamed conglomerate that employs Lloyd and a locker room full of junior-high school boys is that the boys have better manners. Lloyd and his fellow vice-presidents, driven largely by lust, greed, and gluttony, have rutted their way happily through the early '90s, accomplishing little but not doing too much damage either. But the poker-party life is threatened for good by Doug, a manipulative and humorless executive vice-president at the Chicago headquarters who suddenly takes an interest in the New York operation. Acting on his orders, Lloyd, along with his mentor and boss, Walt, and their fellow managers, negotiate a series of megamergers that will give their company a near global monopoly. Late in the process, however, they figure out that it will also leave them, at an awkward point in their careers, without employment. That's when Lloyd shows what he's really made of. Aided by his cocaine-addled underling Ron and fueled by copious amounts of booze, tobacco, and illicit sex, Lloyd emerges as the leader who sabotages the merger and vanquishes Doug, exiling him to the gulag of early retirement. In the process, Lloyd and Ron unmask the ultimate puppeteer, the mysterious and seldom-seen CEO, Arthur, who rules from chambers atop the corporate headquarters tower in Chicago. With a fine eye for the ridiculous, Bing has created an often hilarious sendup of the '90s corporation in all its hypocritical, pompous, and downright nonsensical splendor. Bing (in reality Gil Schwartz, a CBS executive) knows his stuff. Lloyd is packaged as a lampoon of the kind of pseudo-scientific management-consultant report that has proliferated thanks to desktop publishing and do-it-yourself color copying. The book is larded with full-color charts and graphs that purport to measure every aspect of Lloyd's progress through the decade, including a fever chart on the ''Percent of Lloyd's Bosses Displaying Insane Behavior'' and a bar graph revealing ''Suit Size as a Function of Income/Vodka Consumption.'' Lloyd is a romp. But it is also a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy. Although it offers a scathing view of Big Business as practiced in the era of downsizing and reengineering, ultimately Lloyd the book is cramped by Lloyd the hero's adolescent world view. The only two women characters, Lloyd's wife Donna and his executive girlfriend Mona, start out with the promise of becoming great comic heroines, but inexplicably, both end up as adoring love slaves of the portly, middle-aged Lloyd. That's a fantasy, all right. BY MARY KUNTZ RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Lloyd: What Happened'' Return to top of story

Updated Apr. 30, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use