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Who Is Your Elephant?

At the request of an organizational leader, I was asked to read Throwing the Elephant by Stanley Bing. It is a book about managing upward.
In the foreword, the third sentence is, "You can't choose your boss." 
The book plays on a CEO stereotype that is characterized in many movies, but the most recent one that I can remember is Too Big to Fail. Think Gordon Gecko, Chainsaw Al Dunlap, Robert Nardelli, etc... 
My takeaway from the book is that your boss (i.e., elephant) just is, you must figure out how to coexist within its ecosystem. 

 So the question to me now becomes, why was I asked to read the book? Here are the reasons that I can think of: 

  1. To quote a friend, "[Am I] getting Punk'd?" I am a business book junkie, this one never made my radar.
  2. Is this a mentoring session? Thinking about myself for a minute, is a message trying to be sent to me? 
  3. Or is this a book used to influence a working relationship between colleagues? Develop a common connection if you will. 
I'm not sure. 

For someone that was A. was raised by Buddhists; and B. likes elephants  - being asked to read this book threw me into an otherwise more confused state than I am already in. For the 2 people that read my blog, you understand how confused that is. I study leaders like Bezos (Amazon), Schultz (Starbucks), and Hseih (Zappo's). The concept of working for the elephants described in the book doesn't even compute with me. Or maybe that's the point. 
What I am doing is reading the book a second time, because somewhere, there is that needle in the haystack that hit a chord. i just need to find it.

Ask yourself, "Who is your elephant?" After that, you are on your own. 

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