Who

Schwartz wears two hats. By day, he's the executive vice president of communications for CBS. As the humorist "Stanley Bing," he writes a column for Fortune and has authored a number of bestselling books.

Backstory

Schwartz was raised in New Rochelle and attended Brandeis before taking a job as a writer for the Boston Phoenix. At 28, he moved to New York to pursue a theater career, working by day at a media company—TelePromptTer, which became part of HBO—to pay the bills. When he was offered a column in Esquire in the early 1980s, he picked the pen name Stanley Bing to avoid sabotaging his budding corporate career. (He says he took the name from a character that was cut from one of his early plays.) By the 1990s, Schwartz was a corporate communications exec at Westinghouse; after the company was acquired by CBS in 1995, he joined the Tiffany network as vice president. Following Viacom and CBS's split in 2004, he was named chief communications officer at the company, reporting to Les Moonves. But he's been plenty busy in his free time: Over the past decade and a half, he's pumped out nearly a dozen books under the name Stanley Bing.

Of note

As CBS's chief spinmeister, Schwartz has had to handle a handful of firestorms over the last few years (Dan Rather's Killian documents report, Dan Rather's resignation, Dan Rather's lawsuit) as well as persistent questions about his nutty overlord, Sumner Redstone. As Bing, he gets to indulge his irreverent half and has churned out books like What Would Machiavelli Do?, Throwing The Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up, Sun Tzu Was A Sissy, and 100 Bullshit Jobs and How To Get Them. His identity as Bing remained a secret until 1996, when he was fingered by former Esquire colleague Randall Rothenberg; when a Times reporter called CBS's chairman for comment, he referred the call to his head of corporate communications—Schwartz.

Personal

The Michael's regular has two grown children: Nina, a Tufts graduate, and Will, an NYU student. He has a home in New Rochelle and an apartment on the Upper East Side that he purchased in 2005.