Never before have the opening credits of a business book made us laugh.

But the list of books in W.W. Norton's "Enterprise Series" extols an illustrious group of thinkers and observers, including Ken Auletta, George Gilder, Tim Parks … and Stanley Bing, author of Rome, Inc.

Really. Bing. Whose latest joke-filled send-up, subtitled "The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation," was being given away today during lunch at Michael's restaurant, the den of the media elite (many of whom Bing tells us would have been quite at home in the vicious and highly political Rome of old).

The book starts with a dedication in part to "Nero and Caligula, not for how weird they might have been, but for how much they are like … half the guys on the twenty-third floor" and thanks the Etruscans "for having the good sense to submit to the inexorable power of a corporate culture more powerful than theirs."

And the silliness continues from there.

What would Gilder, that ultra-serious future-thinker who brought us groundbreaking thoughts on media convergence before we knew what the Web was, say? Or Parks? What about Gil Schwartz?