potty jokes, you're not exactly going to be telling him witticisms from The New Yorker. At the same time, if you have a sophisticated­ group, you may not bring the whoopee cushion to the budget meeting. On the other­ hand, a whoopee cushion at the budget­ meeting is often quite effective.

On the other side of the coin, you talk a lot in your latest book about the importance of executive warriors being able to tap into their anger. What role does rage play in the corporate world?
In my new book, I write all these unpleasant things about all these people who are angry and difficult to deal with. And it's important to be able to generate that kind of similar intensity. And people think, Oh, how nasty. How unfortunate. But the fact is, that's the way things are. The people who are very successful are not very nice people. And as you get more successful, I believe, you become a jerk. As people get more successful, they get more stressed out. They tend to become selfish, instead of the other way around. The more you have, the more you want. And the more you want, the more frustrated you get. There's no way someone who's a CEO of a company can be as happy as they want to be all the time.

Can you think of a good example?
I once stayed in the Hamptons for a few weeks. I made the mistake of renting a one-room shack for half my salary for a summer. It was wall-to-wall CEOs. All driving cars bigger than my apartment. It's the only place I've ever been where I was crossing the street with a baby in a stroller and a guy in a Benz honked at me. And I thought, This is the executive mind. This is somebody who is so angry that I'm impeding his progress to get a cherry pie for $25 that he's honking at a man walking a baby down the street. But that angry person, that's the person who's going to rise to the top of corporate life.