Gil Schwartz
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.
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 at a media company 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. 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 columns and a dozen books under the name Stanley Bing. As CBS's chief spinmeister, Schwartz has had to handle a handful of firestorms (like Dan Rather's resignation), but as Bing, he gets to indulge his irreverent half. His identity as Bing remained a secret until 1996, when he was fingered by former Esquire colleague Randall Rothenberg. [Image via Getty]