(FORTUNE Magazine) – I'm always amazed at the things business people do to improve themselves. Every year we're pretty much required to buy a fat tome chock-full of anecdotes to scare and inform us about the newest strategy to manage our way to quality or take care of our problems in a minute or a second, or by walking around, or by getting into a zone or out of a zone, either by dressing right, or conquering the inner beast, or dominating our matrix, or, well, whatever, literally. I myself have a few dozen such volumes, bought when I believed management was a rational occupation.

Now I just read the newspapers. Every day they're full of stories that could help anybody be a better taker of meeting, giver of phone, and all-around corporate strategist. The good news is that you don't have to look in the business pages--jammed as they are with self-serving positioning by mercantile statesmen. All you'll ever need to know is in news, sports, and lifestyle.

So grab a cup of coffee and settle back. Here's what a careful gleaning of today's crop delivers:

First comes a front-page report that fighting in Cambodia is expected to increase in the wake of the fall of the Khmer Rouge's Pol Pot, possibly the worst chief executive since Hitler. This is only the most recent in a series of stories both instructive and grimly amusing. Prior to his ouster, for instance, Mr. Pot, like many a senior officer in trouble, tried to slow his demise by retiring his No. 2 man first. This is what happened to my friend over at Hearst not long ago. His boss was on his last legs but saved himself for about six weeks by pitching my pal overboard. So Mr. Pot had the right idea. But where my buddy got a reasonable settlement and a summer off to think about his situation, Mr. Pot's No. 2 was shot several times, apparently, and then run over! Round my corporation, we usually find it sufficient to shoot a person. Running over is a new and dramatic addition to the termination ritual.

Several lessons are to be learned here, as post-Pot Cambodia blows up and falls apart at the same time:

1. When you're out, you're out. It doesn't pay to hang around after you've been shot to see if you can get run over.

2. Your killers are probably scheduled for execution themselves, so don't worry.

3. Just because a boss is strong doesn't mean he's going to leave his company in good shape after he's gone.

4. Top guys play by different rules and will probably do better than you, even in defeat.

Next comes an item about the trial of what we customarily refer to as a "reputed mobster," Vincenzo "the Chin" Gigante. It's a normal mob trial, except that Mr. Gigante has an interesting act: He arrives in court in a bathrobe and stubble, feigning madness. In other respects he's as effective as Howard Hughes, having reputedly run his family as well as the next don. But students of management are directed to the following development: Annoyed by the unsightly growth of beard and rumpled look affected by the nutty mobster, the judge recently instructed Mr. Chin to shave and to lose the Bellevue Hospital pajama look. Chin did, and now his trial, which had been distracted by his eccentricities, is proceeding at an alarming pace, which can't possibly be good for him.

We can take several points from this:

1. In any structured environment, conformity to certain conventions is equated with sanity. You can be a monster, a nitwit, or a boob, but if you shave and put on a suit, people think you're absolutely fabulous. This is why in most cases it pays to wear one.

2. On the other hand, it's unwise, once you reach a certain point in your career, to change your act. If you got your title while wearing a taffeta tutu and Ray-Bans, keep wearing them until you retire. Lose your style, and you might lose your edge.

3. You have to shave only if you're working for somebody else. Browsing on, I find a trove of stories that should shock and inflict both loathing and wisdom. On the left side of the page is a huge headline that reads: REDSTONE ON NOTICE: DITCH BLOCKBUSTER. As any media observer knows, Viacom's acquisition of Blockbuster Video was not a smooth marriage. As such, it is typical of troubled mergers in recent years. Story two reveals that--lookie here!--mergers are at an all-time high. Item three is a cream-filled salute to that puffed-up aggregation of troublemakers--Herb Allen's summer confab of veal-fed moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho. This group of former government bureaucrats and other job hunters; current, once, and future CEOs; and professional pundits and ponderers has been one of the great sources of merger mongering since the robber barons of the early 20th century decided to carve up all existing industries for more efficient distribution of capital.

A rich goulash of insight flows from these stories:

1. If you work for a company, it's best to ignore all headlines. There's no reason that Mr. Redstone, the head of Viacom, should care one bit what a newspaper owned by Mr. Rupert Murdoch wants him to do. It's possible he should do the opposite.

2. Mergers enrich transaction-based players, including nabobs, moguls, poohbahs, investment bankers, stock dudes, lawyers, and a few key senior managers at each company. What do all these people have in common? They represent 90% of the sources for most newspaper stories, which is why the media loves a good, bloody merger more than anything else.

3. Most mergers fail for a complicated phalanx of reasons, but it all boils down to the fact that they're stupid. They also hurt people. Remember that when someone describes a beautiful merger concept that might involve you.

Well, we're almost out of coffee, and there's so much else going on. There's Mike Tyson, who instructs us not to lose our temper. And a long piece on the phenomenon known as road rage, in which aggressive schmucks attack other people who get in the way of their four-by-fours. But it's our very last story of the day that is my favorite. It's about the guy who was in the bathroom on his transatlantic flight, reading. The flight attendants, thinking he was smoking, broke down the door and hauled him into the full view of the other passengers, blubbering and half naked. He's now suing the airline for millions. I think he'll win. Your lesson?

1. They're gonna get you now and then.

2. When they do, make 'em pay.

And that, my friends, is the news!

By day, STANLEY BING is a real executive at a real FORTUNE 500 company he'd rather not name.