Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Stanley Bing by Lauren Everitt, managing editor, Poets&Quants. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Can you really pack a two-year, $250,000-curriculum in a single book? Author and longtime Fortune columnist Stanley Bing sets out to do exactly that in The Curriculum: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master of Business Arts.

If the concept strikes you as preposterous, a peek inside will do little to dispel these doubts. From the accreditation body, the National Association for Serious Study (“dedicated to a number of serious studies”), to a core curriculum that includes Not Appearing Stupid and Crazy People, the book offers a satirical take on an overly staid subject. Think Stephen Colbert meets B-school – with info graphics as Lauren Everitt, Poets&Quants’ managing editor, puts it.

The humor, though pointed, is not what’s surprising. Rather, it’s the truth behind Bing’s bold, irreverent approach. Just as The Office and Dilbert magnify the absurdities of the 9-to-5 grind, so too Bing uses humor to poke holes in accepted business pedagogy. The glossary, for instance, defines marketing as the “art of creating demand for a product or service nobody knows they need,” while mergers are compared with insect marriage: “one spouse, and all its bodily parts, will be eaten as soon as intercourse is done.”

For all its flippancy, the book has valuable lessons: write short emails, don’t sound stupid, learn how to bullshit effectively, be respectful but not servile, and ditch the Bluetooth. The book is particularly useful for lessons you can’t get in a classroom: Few B-schools will tell you, on record anyway, that you’re likely to get docked a few points for sporting a hipster ponytail or that sipping a happy-hour Sprite instead of scotch could result in subtle shunning. Academic institutions fail to explain that your boss could very will be a raging psychopath, or that your coworkers will display at least one type of crazy – much less how to deal with them.

Without the strictures of academia, Bing throws political correctness to the wind and offers his readers a crash course on business boiled down to what it really is: interactions between humans for money and all the complications that invites. While the book is not likely to replace an MBA, it’s certainly a solid guide for navigating the nuances of business.

In a wide-ranging interview with Poets&Quants, Bing lays out his motivations for the book, where B-schools are missing the mark, and his top advice for business students.

What prompted you to write the book?

I’ve written a lot of books that straddle the line between whimsy and advice. In What Would Machiavelli Do? I explored why mean people do so well in business and in Crazy Bosses I explored the idea that pathology, which would be liability in any other venue, can be an asset in business. So I’ve been thinking about these things and working in corporations for a long time, and I wanted to aggregate a lot of these ideas in a course of study that would explore the irrational like a classical MBA explores the rational.

I’ve always seen business as being more irrational, emotional, personality-driven, and humorous than how it’s portrayed in business writing. I looked at what people study when they get their MBAs. I reviewed the curricula of top business schools, including Kellogg, Harvard, Stanford, and Stern. Much of it didn’t speak to me or the skills that deliver success to people I’ve known. So I did an alternative curriculum.

The book is quite harsh on the MBA. Do you think it’s a dud degree?

I think business school is marketed as if it’s a panacea for everything. I stopped in Oakland, CA, and saw three enormous billboards telling people they should go get their MBA. They can choose from Davis, Berkeley, or Stanford. But do all these people really need an MBA?

In most of my department, there are no MBAs. We do have a few in finance, but not in sales, and I don’t think you need an MBA to be successful in sales. It’s an innate quality, like musical talent. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t know one great sales representative who learned it in business school. Actually, I can think of one, but he’s a genius and his MBA led him to become a CEO.

I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that the whole thing is a big fake, but it does have a very specific purpose, and it’s not for everyone.

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Stanley Bing is a columnist for Fortune magazine and the bestselling author of Crazy Bosses, What Would Machiavelli Do?, Throwing the Elephant, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, 100 Bullshit Jobs…and How to Get Them, and The Big Bing, as well as the novels Lloyd: What Happened and You Look Nice Today. By day he is an haute executive in a gigantic multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst-kept secrets in business.